Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Cold Comfort


By Alan Caruba

Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it’s not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it’s because of “global warming.”

I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, “Jack doesn’t believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that—to put it in scientific terms—it’s summer and the sun is hot.”

On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that “If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.”

IT’S SUMMERTIME, SETH! IT GETS HOT IN THE SUMMER!

It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There’s a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It’s about trends and cycles.

It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that “more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States.” The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that “The US is less than 10% of the globe” while ignoring that "Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter.”

What we should all know by now is that the Warmists all use trickery to advance their hoax.

The simple fact is that heat waves are nothing new. In 1936 a North American heat wave was the most severe in the modern history of the continent. It occurred in the middle of the Great Depression, killing more than 5,000 Americans and desiccating vast amounts of crops. To put it in perspective, there were no home air conditioning appliances at the time. People depended on fans to circulate the air.

The sun surely is hot, but its heat—solar radiation—has not been sufficient to avoid cyclical ice ages and short term periods of intense cold because the sun itself goes through cycles of increasing and diminishing solar radiation.

There was a “Little Ice Age” that lasted between 1550 and 1850. Temperatures dropped to the point that the Thames River in England froze over and “frost fairs” were held on its surface. It was felt through Europe and parts of North America.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley noted that “Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods,” adding that “this warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end.”

The average length of interglacial periods is 11,500 years.

In the 1970s, prior to the global warming hoax, many scientists were convinced that a new ice age had begun. In January 2012, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Habibullo Abdusamatov, predicted that the next ice age will begin in 2014 and will last at least two centuries. Regarding the timing, he could be right. He could be wrong. One thing is sure. The Earth is overdue another ice age.

My friend, Robert W. Felix, the author of “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, is an expert on ice ages and magnetic reversals. It is the latter that accompanied mass extinctions such as the dinosaur’s fate and many other species at the end of the Cretaceous period. In ice ages, the Earth’s water doesn’t disappear, it turns to ice. The current growth of the planet’s glaciers is an indicator of what is actually occurring.

Another indicator, of course, is the sun. On January 29, 2012, writing in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, David Rose noted that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.”

“After emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters, and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.”

“We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’…but sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th century.” Oddly, despite the obvious and documented effect of the sun on the planet’s average temperature, there remain scientists who are unconvinced of its essential role. Only a relative few even understand the role of magnetic reversals on the planet’s history.

Actually, the diminishing number of sunspots has been known for a while. In June 2010, Stuart Clark, writing in The New Scientist, observed that “For the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

The obvious often catches people by surprise. The last Ice Age came on very swiftly and the next is likely to do so as well. In the meantime, the current heat wave will capture everyone’s attention.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

4 comments:

LarryOldtimer said...

There have always been periods of rather intense cold throughout history. And high temperatures.

Ask any farmer's child of my generation, and that child would know, as I know, that carbon dioxide is the gas of living things. And 4 times as much would be very good for all creatures on Planet Earth.

Moreover, it would seem that chemistry was taught better during the 1950s.

The ozone in the upper atmosphere is due to oxygen (O2) molecules intercepting high energy UV light, splitting into 2 O radicals, which then latch onto O2 molecules making O3 molecules which are called Ozone.

It is not the Ozone molecules that protect us from high energy UV, but are simply the result of O2 molecules doing the protection. The absolute refusal to look back more than 30 years to see the results of Nature at work is most foolish.

These eejits say that "climate" and "weather" are two different things. Well, there is no actual "global climate", and local climates are simply weather events over a period of years. At present, that period of years appears to be the past 30 years of compiled weather and temperature events.

Harry Dale Huffman said...

Climate science miseducation goes back two generations, basically to Carl Sagan introducing the idea of "runaway greenhouse effect" for the high temperatures found on Venus. Now the "consensus" scientists are incompetent, as I showed simply by comparing the temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth, at points of equal pressure, and quickly found that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio is a constant that is fully and precisely explained by the two planets' distances from the Sun, their common heat source. Venus has over 2400 times the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide as Earth does, but that does not cause any temperature elevation in Venus's atmosphere, beyond that predicted by their solar distances alone. It is the definitive fact that completely disproves the "consensus" theory of runaway global warming. The Venus/Earth comparison also confirms the long-known Standard Atmosphere model of the Earth's atmosphere as the equilibrium, or preferred state, of the atmosphere; simply put, it means the atmosphere is fundamentally stable, not subject to and runaway global warming, or cooling, at all. But the "War of the Insane Left" going on today, added to academic intransigence in the face of awkward new knowledge academic scientists don't want to recognize--and so simply don't--makes for a situation in which everyone is reluctant to lend credence to revolutionary, but quite basic, knowledged that in fact should have overturned the present consensus 20 years ago, when the Venus data was obtained by the Magellan spacecraft. It is all insanity in the public debates now, but my simple Venus/Earth comparison will eventually force a wholesale rethinking of climate science, and the theories at its base that are now thought to be "settled science". What the public sees in mainstream media reports is pure propaganda, foisted on the public to lend cover to the political power-grab by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into such insane projects as shutting down our use of fossil fuels, without adequate alternative energy resources to replace them.

Unknown said...

I find it incomprehensible that 'warmists' use the last 200 years of weather data to predict anything. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, 200 years of data is only 0.0004% of climate history.

Ronbo said...

It's 55 degrees Fahrenheit this morning in Seattle - and the temperature may soar into the lower 70s by this afternoon.

This is amazing since this city gets more its share of hot air from our Leftist ruling class about Global Warming.