"Global Warming" aka Fraud. Did Greenies cause your house to flood? Could be...
Radical environmentalists have been behind the wave of forest fires in the West and the collapse of the logging industry there. When you do not log and do not clear brush you get forest fires. Homeowners are even prevented from cutting down brush near their homes in California and then when the fires come they have no barrier between their homes and the fire. Duh. Don't buy the hype, the wave of wildfires in the West began AFTER the logging restrictions hit the West Coast states.
Green Goofs have willingly let California farmers famish while preserving water for an obscure variety of fish. No big surprise, it was their ridiculous movement to rid the world of DDT after Rachel Carson's spurious and untruthful book, "Silent Spring" that is largely responsible for the deaths of millions of poor African natives from malaria because of mosquitoes which could have been controlled and largely eradicated by DDT. Mosquito nets are a poor substitute. On top of that, environmentalists have fought to prevent third world countries from building up a modern culture by blocking the building of power plants and thereby keeping third world countries from advancing their civilizations. The UN is the primary culprit here.
The Obama Administration let that oil spill linger in the Gulf and was shocked when nature did much of the cleanup in spite of Federal inaction and outright blocking of methods and means that could have been effective. Still, the President's refusal to let the spill be dealt with swiftly and his blocking of oil drilling and harvesting now has brought poverty to the Gulf regions. In addition, the EPA is responsible for the flooding that is wiping out all or parts of neighborhoods and towns because of floods that should have and could have been stopped by dams that had originally been designed to save riverside communities from disaster. I intend to present to you evidence that:
“Between 2001 and 2010 global average temperature decreased by 0.05 degrees, over the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by 5 per cent. Ergo, carbon dioxide emissions are not driving dangerous warming.” - Australian scientist Bob Carter
climate depot pic
By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance
June 21, 2011
Enter Energygate—the latest scandal destroying the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
November, 2009, brought Climategate—the release of thousands of emails, computer programs, and other documents showing that climate scientists in control of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fabricated, exaggerated, suppressed, and corrupted data to support belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and had intimidated dissenting scientists and journal editors who would publish their work, corrupted the peer review process, and flouted canons of scientific transparency as well as American and British freedom of information laws.
The first few months of 2010 brought Himalayagate, Amazongate, and a variety of other revelations that IPCC’s vaunted AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) had incorporated non-peer reviewed articles, indeed sometimes outright propaganda pieces produced by environmental advocacy organizations, as sources of some of its most alarming predictions.
Later in 2010 came recommendations from the InterAcademy Council (IAC) Committee to Review the IPCC for steps that must be taken to improve IPCC’s function and credibility. Among the most important was adoption and implementation of a clear conflict of interest policy that would, among other things, prevent much of what was revealed in Climategate, Himalayagate, etc.
Now, Energygate.
On May 9, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed in a press release that a forthcoming report “showed” that “80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewable by mid-century” even if all nuclear energy production ceased.
On June 14 IPCC at last released the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRRES) and the reality falls more than a little short of the claim.
First, the SRRES shows no such thing. It claims it, but it provides no evidence for it.
Second, the part of the report misrepresented as showing it depended on a paper by a Greenpeace renewable energy advocate, Sven Teske, who was also a lead author of the report—and the article itself depended on an advocacy piece by Teske previously written for Greenpeace.
Third, the “research” for the paper was sponsored by the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry consortium.
Both “second” and “third” involve conflict of interest and bias and strip the paper and its claim of scientific credibility.
But there’s more.
Fourth, the “close to 80 percent” figure was cherry-picked from the most extreme outlier of 164 scenarios referenced in the report—a scenario that assumes the extremely unlikely, and extremely optimistic, coupling of sharp reductions in global energy demand over the next 40 years, on the one hand, with strong economic growth and 28 percent population growth, on the other. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty involved, there’s also the problem that to be of any real value to decision makers, planning must be based not on the most optimistic scenarios but on the most realistic.
Fifth, it turns out that the whole report is, as Christopher Booker puts it, “astonishingly one-sided” and “reads less like a scientific document and more like a propaganda puff for the world’s renewable industries.”
Sixth (and finally?—who knows?), as if the flouting of basic conflict-of-interest and objectivity standards in all these instances were not enough, the IPCC has now formally announced that it won’t require authors of next year’s AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) to comply with any conflict of interest policies.
In an interview June 17, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri—whose ownership interests in businesses with a stake in renewable energy create his own serious conflicts of interest—said at a meeting in Brussels June 16, reported by Oliver Morton of The Economist, that since authors for AR5 have already been selected, “it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.”
IPCC does indeed have a conflict of interest policy—and a policy against bias. Both were adopted at its 33rd Session, in May, in Abu Dhabi. According to the IPCC’s own policies:
Today, Pachauri’s announcement makes headlines here and there. Will it be remembered when IPCC releases AR5? Not likely. The vast majority of the mainstream media are ignoring it now, and they’re not likely to discover it then.
I have a recommendation: When AR5 gets published, its front cover, every page, its executive summary, and every press release about it should carry this disclaimer: “The authors of this report have been exempted from the conflict-of-interest and bias policies of the IPCC, which therefore makes no claims of and takes no responsibility for the credibility of any of its contents.”
Sources:
IPCC, Press Release, May 9, 2011
IPCC, Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
Mark Lynas, New IPCC Error: Renewables Report Conclusion Was Dictated by Greenpeace
Steve McIntyre, IPCC WG3 and the Greenpeace Karaoke; Responses from IPCC SRREN; Pachauri: No Conflict of Interest Policy for AR5; Lynas’ Questions
Oliver Wright, Climate Change Panel in Hot Water Again Over ‘Biased’ Energy Report
Donna Laframboise, IPCC: These People Haven’t Learned a Thing
Christopher Booker, The IPCC Declares Greenpeace in Our Time
Congressman Paul Broun, June 17, 2011, letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
Oliver Moreton (“Babbage”), The IPCC and Greenpeace: Renewable Outrage
3D forecast-model of a coronal mass ejection. NASA.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.
Green Goofs have willingly let California farmers famish while preserving water for an obscure variety of fish. No big surprise, it was their ridiculous movement to rid the world of DDT after Rachel Carson's spurious and untruthful book, "Silent Spring" that is largely responsible for the deaths of millions of poor African natives from malaria because of mosquitoes which could have been controlled and largely eradicated by DDT. Mosquito nets are a poor substitute. On top of that, environmentalists have fought to prevent third world countries from building up a modern culture by blocking the building of power plants and thereby keeping third world countries from advancing their civilizations. The UN is the primary culprit here.
The Obama Administration let that oil spill linger in the Gulf and was shocked when nature did much of the cleanup in spite of Federal inaction and outright blocking of methods and means that could have been effective. Still, the President's refusal to let the spill be dealt with swiftly and his blocking of oil drilling and harvesting now has brought poverty to the Gulf regions. In addition, the EPA is responsible for the flooding that is wiping out all or parts of neighborhoods and towns because of floods that should have and could have been stopped by dams that had originally been designed to save riverside communities from disaster. I intend to present to you evidence that:
- The world is cooling, not warming
- The scientific community is not in agreement with the alarmists but quite the opposite
- Radical environmentalists are harmful to our economy and to the quality of human life all over the planet
- The Sun is the primary factor in the climate machinery of Earth and certainly not man
“Between 2001 and 2010 global average temperature decreased by 0.05 degrees, over the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by 5 per cent. Ergo, carbon dioxide emissions are not driving dangerous warming.” - Australian scientist Bob Carter
Sometimes you have to stop and try to snap people out of it! Since so many Darwinists show up here, thought I would remind them that Global Warming is NOT happening and any attempt to limit carbon in the atmosphere is stupid. Why should we try to limit plant food?
As far back as Spring 2009 the groundswell of scientists who were willing to sign their names on a petition scoffing at Global Warming was well over 700 names.
By the end of 2010, the names had grown beyond 1,000. You can read the 321 page pdf here.
A few quotes for your reading pleasure:
“We're not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” -- UN IPCC's Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.
“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” -- NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.
“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself -- Climate is beyond our power to control...Earth doesn't care about governments or their legislation. You can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself.” -- Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn't happen...Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” -- Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.
“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate...The planet's climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” -- Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences...AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” -- Brazilian Geologist Geraldo LuÃs Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”
"I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” -- Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic's View.”
“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what 'science' has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” -- Research Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere” and he published a paper in August 2009 titled “Atmospheric Temperature Distribution in a Gravitational Field.” [Update December 9, 2010]
“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” -- Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University. [Updated December 9, 2010. Corrects Jelbring's quote.]
“Those who call themselves 'Green planet advocates' should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere...Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content...Al Gore's personal behavior supports a green planet - his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” -- Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named "100 most influential people in the world, 2004" by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him "the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer."
“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith...My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” -- Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia's CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.
“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” -- Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens' Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.
“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cycles are related to solar activity...In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” -- Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.” -- Hebrew University Professor Dr. Michael Beenstock an honorary fellow with Institute for Economic Affairs who published a study challenging man-made global warming claims titled “Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming.”
“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it's fraud.” -- South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.
"The scientific reality is that from A-Z, the scientific case for man-made climate fears has collapsed. The Arctic has rebounded in recent years, the Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in past few summers, polar bears appear to be thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and may be dropping, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement and scientists continue to dissent at a rapid pace. Poor Al Gore, he has been reduced to criticizing his own party's president for failing to act to stop “climate change.” " Marc Morano of Climate Depot
Fraud like that which is associated with the IPCC:
Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance
June 21, 2011
Enter Energygate—the latest scandal destroying the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
November, 2009, brought Climategate—the release of thousands of emails, computer programs, and other documents showing that climate scientists in control of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fabricated, exaggerated, suppressed, and corrupted data to support belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and had intimidated dissenting scientists and journal editors who would publish their work, corrupted the peer review process, and flouted canons of scientific transparency as well as American and British freedom of information laws.
The first few months of 2010 brought Himalayagate, Amazongate, and a variety of other revelations that IPCC’s vaunted AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) had incorporated non-peer reviewed articles, indeed sometimes outright propaganda pieces produced by environmental advocacy organizations, as sources of some of its most alarming predictions.
Later in 2010 came recommendations from the InterAcademy Council (IAC) Committee to Review the IPCC for steps that must be taken to improve IPCC’s function and credibility. Among the most important was adoption and implementation of a clear conflict of interest policy that would, among other things, prevent much of what was revealed in Climategate, Himalayagate, etc.
Now, Energygate.
On May 9, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed in a press release that a forthcoming report “showed” that “80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewable by mid-century” even if all nuclear energy production ceased.
On June 14 IPCC at last released the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRRES) and the reality falls more than a little short of the claim.
First, the SRRES shows no such thing. It claims it, but it provides no evidence for it.
Second, the part of the report misrepresented as showing it depended on a paper by a Greenpeace renewable energy advocate, Sven Teske, who was also a lead author of the report—and the article itself depended on an advocacy piece by Teske previously written for Greenpeace.
Third, the “research” for the paper was sponsored by the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry consortium.
Both “second” and “third” involve conflict of interest and bias and strip the paper and its claim of scientific credibility.
But there’s more.
Fourth, the “close to 80 percent” figure was cherry-picked from the most extreme outlier of 164 scenarios referenced in the report—a scenario that assumes the extremely unlikely, and extremely optimistic, coupling of sharp reductions in global energy demand over the next 40 years, on the one hand, with strong economic growth and 28 percent population growth, on the other. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty involved, there’s also the problem that to be of any real value to decision makers, planning must be based not on the most optimistic scenarios but on the most realistic.
Fifth, it turns out that the whole report is, as Christopher Booker puts it, “astonishingly one-sided” and “reads less like a scientific document and more like a propaganda puff for the world’s renewable industries.”
In an interview June 17, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri—whose ownership interests in businesses with a stake in renewable energy create his own serious conflicts of interest—said at a meeting in Brussels June 16, reported by Oliver Morton of The Economist, that since authors for AR5 have already been selected, “it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.”
IPCC does indeed have a conflict of interest policy—and a policy against bias. Both were adopted at its 33rd Session, in May, in Abu Dhabi. According to the IPCC’s own policies:
A “conflict of interest” refers to any current professional, financial or other interest which could: i) significantly impair the individual’s objectivity in carrying out his or her duties and responsibilities for the IPCC, or ii) create an unfair advantage for any person or organization. For the purposes of this policy, circumstances that could lead a reasonable person to question an individual’s objectivity, or whether an unfair advantage has been created, constitute a potential conflict of interest. These potential conflicts are subject to disclosure.And with respect to bias:
Those involved in selecting authors will need to strive for an author team composition that reflects a balance of expertise and perspectives, such that IPCC products are comprehensive, objective, and neutral with respect to policy. In selecting these individuals, care must be taken to ensure that biases can be balanced where theyHow important are these to the IPCC? Here’s its own statement:
exist.
The role of the IPCC demands that it pay special attention to issues of independence and bias in order to maintain the integrity of, and public confidence in, its products and processes. It is essential that the work of IPCC is not compromised by any conflict of interest for those who execute it….Nonetheless, says Pachauri, AR5’s author’s, because they’ve already been selected, won’t be required to live up to this policy.Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA), chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, fired off a letter June 17—apparently without knowledge of Pachauri’s statement—to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon expressing his “concern about the lack of progress in implementation of the conflict of interest recommendation of the” IAC.
The IPCC Conflict of Interest Policy is designed to ensure that conflicts of interest are identified, communicated to the relevant parties, and managed to avoid any adverse impact on IPCC balance, products and processes, thereby protecting the individual, the IPCC, and the public interest. The individual and the IPCC should not be placed in a situation that could lead a reasonable person to question, and perhaps discount or dismiss, the work of the IPCC simply because of the existence of a conflict of interest.
Today, Pachauri’s announcement makes headlines here and there. Will it be remembered when IPCC releases AR5? Not likely. The vast majority of the mainstream media are ignoring it now, and they’re not likely to discover it then.
I have a recommendation: When AR5 gets published, its front cover, every page, its executive summary, and every press release about it should carry this disclaimer: “The authors of this report have been exempted from the conflict-of-interest and bias policies of the IPCC, which therefore makes no claims of and takes no responsibility for the credibility of any of its contents.”
Sources:
IPCC, Press Release, May 9, 2011
IPCC, Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
Mark Lynas, New IPCC Error: Renewables Report Conclusion Was Dictated by Greenpeace
Steve McIntyre, IPCC WG3 and the Greenpeace Karaoke; Responses from IPCC SRREN; Pachauri: No Conflict of Interest Policy for AR5; Lynas’ Questions
Oliver Wright, Climate Change Panel in Hot Water Again Over ‘Biased’ Energy Report
Donna Laframboise, IPCC: These People Haven’t Learned a Thing
Christopher Booker, The IPCC Declares Greenpeace in Our Time
Congressman Paul Broun, June 17, 2011, letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
Oliver Moreton (“Babbage”), The IPCC and Greenpeace: Renewable Outrage
Fraud. Perpetrated and perpetuated by people like Al Gore and Barack Obama and the EPA and very likely your local schools as well as the news media. There is no reason for them to pay attention to the truth because it doesn't fit in with the politically correct environmentalist concept that somehow it would be great if mankind was poor and we could all live to make life better for frogs?
June 28, 2011
Are Midwest Floods Caused by Global Warming or Radical Environmentalists?
Many Global Warming Alarmists are pointing to the floods in the Midwest as the latest proof of global warming. But a powerful piece at AmericanThinker.com provides an alternative suggestion as to the real cause of the flooding: the perhaps unintended consequences of radical environmentalist policies regarding the system of dams on the Missouri River.
Al Gore gave a speech in New York last week in which he linked the flooding in the Midwest and the fires in Arizona to global warming: “Today, the biggest fire in the history of the state of Arizona is spreading to New Mexico. Today, the biggest flood in the history of the Mississippi River Valley is under way right now,” Gore said. “At what point is there a moment where we say, ‘Oh, we ought to do something about this?’”
One of Gore’s dimmer acolytes, Bill Maher, took up the issue on his show on HBO, “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Maher seemed to be hooked up to a machine that gave him a shock every time he uttered the words “global warming,” which he repeatedly did, before, in each case, correcting himself to say “climate change.” He said, "I don't call it global warming anymore because that is bad. It is climate change." Maher finally got it out, sort of, and asked, “Why doesn't he [Obama] point to this and say this is all because of climate change. He doesn't seem to use what he has to make a case.”
(you must go to the article to watch Bill Maher blab. I prefer not to give him any attention.)
But in the article, “The Purposeful Flooding of America's Heartland,” in American Thinker, Joe Herring makes a very strong, well documented case, that the system of dams built in the area to tame the Missouri River and prevent this sort of thing from happening was well conceived and executed: “Some sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing a series of six dams. The idea was simple: massive dams at the top moderating flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river’s devastating floods.”
But in the 1990s the plan was hijacked by radical environmentalists with a different agenda: “The Clinton administration threw its support behind the change, officially shifting the priorities of the Missouri River dam system from flood control, facilitation of commercial traffic, and recreation to habitat restoration, wetlands preservation, and culturally sensitive and sustainable biodiversity.”
Herring cites Greg Pavelka, a wildlife biologist with the Corps of Engineers in Yankton, SD, who told the Seattle Times that “this event will leave the river in a ‘much more natural state than it has seen in decades,’ describing the epic flooding as a ‘prolonged headache for small towns and farmers along its path, but a boon for endangered species.’”
Herring also documents that, through a series of emails last February, “Ft. Pierre SD Director of Public Works Brad Lawrence sounded the alarm loud and clear,” but the alarm of this “flood of biblical proportions” was not heeded. Why don’t the mainstream media follow up on Mr. Herring’s findings?
For people looking for some straight talk about global warming from some actual scientists who aren’t part of that consensus we’re always hearing about, I recommend The Heartland Institute’s conference this Thursday and Friday, which will be webcast here. This will demonstrate why Maher, and Gore and the other alarmists prefer to call it “climate change,” and not “global warming.” The evidence doesn’t support the warming theory. One of the participants will be Australian scientist Bob Carter, who recently pointed out that “Between 2001 and 2010 global average temperature decreased by 0.05 degrees, over the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by 5 per cent. Ergo, carbon dioxide emissions are not driving dangerous warming.”
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Roger Aronoff is a media analyst with Accuracy in Media, and is the writer/director of the award-winning documentary "Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope." He can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org.
People like Al Gore specifically, who owns four homes, takes private jets everywhere and drives big vehicles and yet goes around preaching the Green Gospel, should be ashamed. Gore was part of the Clinton Administration that changed the concept of river control from home preservation to wetlands expansion. Now thousands upon thousands of homes are destroyed and he has the gall to blame "climate change?"
There is no manmade global warming. The Sun is in charge here, folks!
Quiet Sun, Deadly Sun
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 08:56
Much fanfare was associated with the reappearance of sunspots earlier this year, marking the beginning of a new period of high solar activity. Now come a number of reports saying the Sun is most likely headed for a prolonged period of low activity, possibly rivaling the Maunder minimum. Three independent studies of the Sun's dynamics all predict that the next solar cycle will be significantly delayed and might even be skipped. The Maunder minimum is associated with a prolonged period of climate cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Whether Earth's climate is headed for a significant cooling trend has become a matter of heated debate, while at the same time NASA is warning that a quite Sun can also be a deadly Sun. In the 1850s, following a period of low sunspot activity, the largest coronal ejection event ever witnessed caused havoc with telegraphs and ship's compasses around the world. Such an ejection today could cause widespread power outages and failure of electronic equipment. Will our star turn both quiet and deadly?
Sunspots are relatively cool, dark blemishes on the Sun's surface that indicate regions of intense magnetic activity. Some sunspots are gigantic, often wider than Earth with magnetic fields reaching far into space. For centuries scientists have been using sunspots to gauge solar activity, discovering that visible activity waxes and wains in a regular 11 year cycle. After an unusually quiet period we are now in Solar Cycle 24, which should peak sometime in 2013. But it is what solar scientists are predicting to come after SC 24 that is causing concern among climate scientists.
Sunspot with Earth shown to scale
Newly reported solar observations, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that the Sun could be less active in the coming years. Three independent studies by solar experts all predict that the next solar cycle may not happen, or at least be significantly delayed. Astrogeophysicist Frank Hill and colleagues at the National Solar Observatory, have been monitoring solar cycles using a technique called helioseismology. Hill was the lead author on the first of three papers on these results presented at the American Astronomical Society conference in New Mexico. Using data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) of six observing stations around the world, the team translates surface pulsations caused by sound reverberating through the Sun into models of its internal structure.
Hill et al have been tracking buried “jet streams,” an east-west zonal wind flow encircling the sun called torsional oscillation. Bands of flowing material originate near the Sun's poles and migrate toward the equator. These bands are thought to play a role in generating the Sun's magnetic field and the latitude of this wind stream matches the new spot formation in each cycle. It successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24. “We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now,” Hill explained, “but we see no sign of it. This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all.”
The trend includes sunspots from Solar Cycles 22, 23, and 24.
In the second paper, Matt Penn and William Livingston report a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots. Spots are formed when intense magnetic flux tubes erupt from the interior and keep cooled gas from circulating back to the interior. For typical sunspots this magnetism has a strength of 2,500 to 3,500 gauss, with a minimum field of at least 1,500 gauss to form a dark spot. Penn and Livingston predict that by Cycle 25 magnetic fields erupting on the Sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. According to the press release:
Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. They also observed that spot temperatures have risen exactly as expected for such changes in the magnetic field. If the trend continues, the field strength will drop below the 1,500 gauss threshold and spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome convective forces on the solar surface.
Finally, In the third report, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program at NSO’s Sunspot, NM, facilities has observed a slowing of the rapid poleward shift of magnetic activity observed in the Sun’s corona. Sun watchers call this shift the “rush to the poles,” a well-known pattern where new solar activity emerges first at about 70 degrees latitude at the start of a cycle, then moves toward the equator as the cycle ages. At the same time, the new magnetic fields push remnants of the older cycle as far as 85 degrees poleward.
“In cycles 21 through 23, solar maximum occurred when this rush appeared at an average latitude of 76 degrees,” Altrock said. “Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we’ll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all. If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23’s magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions (the rush to the poles accomplishes this feat). No one knows what the Sun will do in that case.”
“A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the Sun,” Altrock explained. “Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the Sun.” Altrock based his work on four decades of observations with NSO’s 40-cm (16-inch) coronagraphic telescope at Sunspot.
Averaged yearly sunspot numbers. Source NASA.
The bottom line on all of this is that many experts are now predicting a big drop in solar activity in the future. And while some climate change alarmists are dismissing the possible impact of a newly somnolent Sun, others say this could lead to a new Little Ice Age. “If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades,” Hill said. “That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
Recent research has, indeed, linked a quiet Sun to colder climate, yet the advocates of anthropogenic global warming insist the Sun doesn't matter, that human CO2 emissions will overpower the changes in our local star. Consider this mild statement from sciencenews.org:
During the last extended period of solar dormancy, from 1645 to 1715, Europe plunged into some of the coldest winters on record. But Earth’s atmosphere, which now contains an abundance of greenhouse gases, differs in composition compared with three centuries ago, and solar physicists say they’re unsure how a long solar hiatus would affect the planet’s 21st century climate.
Others have not been so measured in their response, even to the point of impugning the reputations of some of the scientists involved. Regardless, the prospect of imminent global cooling certainly throws a wrench into the climate alarmists tale of woe and bolsters the case for a wait and see attitude.
Meanwhile, officials in Britain and the United States are preparing to make controlled power cuts to their national electricity supplies in response to a warning of a possible powerful solar storm hitting the Earth. In an interview with The Independent, Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Center, said that controlled power outages will protect the National Electricity Grids against damage. Without the preemptive measures severe damage could result, which could take months or years to repair. As a recent article on the NASA Science News website put it:
As 2011 unfolds, the sun is once again on the eve of a below-average solar cycle—at least that’s what forecasters are saying. The "Carrington event" of 1859 (named after astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the instigating flare) reminds us that strong storms can occur even when the underlying cycle is nominally weak.
How bad was the Carrington event? Normally, solar storms do not affect people on Earth's surface. Radio communications may be disrupted and dramatic aurora displays may paint the night skies with ghostly dancing light, but generally there is no threat to those living on the planet's surface. In space, on the other hand, large solar explosions can potentially damage satellites and other spacecraft. Of course, as with everything in nature, there are exceptions.
A repeat of the Carrington event would be worse today.
On the morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, English solar astronomer Richard Carrington noted the appearance of an enormous group of extraordinarily bright spots on the face of the Sun. Before dawn the next day, skies all over Earth erupted in brilliant auroras so intense that newspapers could be read as though it were daylight. Miners on Colorado stumbled out of bed and started preparing breakfast, thinking the Sun already up. Stunning auroras appeared even in tropical latitudes, painting the skies over Hawaii and the Bahamas blood red.
More troubling, ships' compasses no longer functioned properly, birds temporarily lost their ability to navigate and telegraph systems around the world were knocked out. Sparks from telegraph keys shocked their operators and set telegraph paper on fire. The Carrington Event's massive coronal mass ejection was sent directly toward Earth, taking only 18 hours to travel the 150 million kilometer distance. Quite remarkable, since such journeys normally take three to four days.
The solar eruption was monstrous, measuring more than X30 on the Solar Richter scale. Though the two scales cannot be directly compared, if the equivalent of the solar explosion were transferred to Earth it would register more than 17 on the terrestrial Richter scale. The total energy emitted was equivalent to tens of millions of atomic bombs exploding at the same time.
Now NASA is warning that it could happen again, and today the situation would be much more serious. Cascading blackouts carried across continents by long-distance power lines could last for weeks to months as engineers struggle to repair damaged transformers. GPS navigation units would no longer function reliably, affecting ship and plane traffic. Banking and financial networks could go offline, disrupting commerce in ways unimagined in the 1850s. According to a 2008 report from the National Academy of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could have the economic impact of 20 hurricane Katrinas.
Moreover, there is nothing we can do to stop such an event. NASA researchers are trying to detect such events in time to warn civil authorities so action can be taken to minimize damage to sensitive infrastructure. In order to predict the weather in space analysts use data from a fleet of NASA spacecraft surrounding the Sun. Analysts feed the information into models running on supercomputers and, within hours of a major eruption, the computers generate a 3D movie showing where the storm will go, which planets and spacecraft it will hit, and when the impacts will occur. See the example animation by clicking on the figure below.
“We can now track the progress of solar storms in 3 dimensions as the storms bear down on Earth,” says Michael Hesse, chief of the GSFC Space Weather Lab. “This sets the stage for actionable space weather alerts that could preserve power grids and other high-tech assets during extreme periods of solar activity.”
It may well be that a quiet Sun is more prone to infrequent but very large ejection events. According to NASA, the solar cycle of 1859 (Solar Cycle 10) was typical of 19th century solar cycles—that is to say, weak. Solar cycles of the 19th century were far below average compared to the intense solar cycles of the Space Age. With solar eruptions, as with climate change, we are helpless before the whims of nature. If anything, our modern technology has made us more vulnerable to nature's rage.
The climate change Cassandra's will insist that global warming is real and that we must do something about it. The real problem here is that scientists have never been able to study such phenomena before—at least not with satellites and modern instruments. Anyone who says they know what effect a prolonged period of solar inactivity would have on today's clime is lying. We can make some inferences based on historical data, data collected by unreliable sources using primitive instruments. Those inferences seem to point to a cooler climate but this is just a guess. But it is a guess based on observations, no matter how dodgy, while the claims of global warming are based on fabrication.
Given the latest solar activity forecast, my suggestion is to do nothing. After all, if we are about to enter a period of global cooling the last thing we need is to try and make things cool still. If we do slip into a long term solar minimum, and given the observation that climate cooling lags solar quiescence by up to a decade, then we should have an answer regarding the Sun climate link in twenty years. So place your bets, CO2 or the Sun—I know which one I'm putting my money on.