Global Warming: Postponing the “apocalypse”

After four and a half hours of what is hopefully my last of the snow shoveling (at least this storm) to get in and out of my rural road, my thoughts again turn to this global warming nonsense that still bubbles under the surface of the world governments. Evidently it’s hard to sell “a sense of urgency” in an ice covered world.

The new bit? Ignore that cooling behind the curtain. Hansen and the die hards are here to tell us that the apocalypse is still coming… evidently it’s just postponed a bit.

Since 1998, the earth has been cooling… not warming.

Bob Carter, a paleoclimatologist from Australia, notes that the earth also had strong global warming between 1918 and 1940. Then there was a long cooling period from 1940 to 1965. He points out that the current warming started 50 years before cars and industries began spewing consequential amounts of CO2. Then the planet cooled for 35 years just after the CO2 levels really began to surge. In fact, says Carter, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between temperatures and man-made CO2.

James Hansen, the global warming advocate eclipsed only by Al Gore in fame and name, apparently is aware of this cooling trend. But with nary a reference to the snowfall, he ignores the snow falling and ice storms… and continues his relentless campaign with his Nov 2008 open letter to Obama.

Although global warming to date is smaller than day-to-day weather fluctuations, it has brought global temperature back to approximately the highest level of the Holocene, the past 10,000 years, the period during which civilization developed. Effects already evident include:

1. Mountain glaciers are receding worldwide and will be gone within 50 years if CO2 emissions continue to increase. This threatens the fresh water supply for billions of people, as rivers arising in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains will begin to run dry in the summer and fall.

2. Coral reefs, home to a quarter of biological species in the ocean, could be destroyed by rising temperature and ocean acidification due to increasing CO2.

3. Dry subtropics are expanding poleward with warming, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, and Australia, with increasing drought and fires.
4. Arctic sea ice will disappear entirely in the summer, if CO2 continues to increase, with devastating effects on wildlife and indigenous people.

5. Intensity of hydrologic extremes, including heavy rains, storms and floods on the one hand, and droughts and fires on the other, are increasing.

His letter is filled with friendly scientific and policy advice for the PEBO. He speaks of the inability to capture CO2 from vehicle emissions. His answer to offset what cannot easily or feasibly be done? The “prompt moratorium on construction of new coal plants,” and phasing out existing ones linearly over the period 2010-2030 to limit the peak of atmospheric CO2 at an amount somewhere between 400 and 425 ppm.

Considering Obama’s promise to implement standards that would bankrupt any coal plant, I’d say that Hansen has a special corner all his own in Obama’s head.

Hansen also points out the futility of carbon caps, instead suggesting a “carbon tax with 100 percent dividend 4 applied to oil, gas and coal [use] at the mine or port of entry”.

It [the carbon tax] would assure that unconventional fossil fuels, such as oil shale and tar sands, stay in the ground, unless an economic method of capturing the CO2 is developed.

The entire tax should be returned to the public, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts. No bureaucracy is needed.

A tax should be called a tax. The public can understand this and will accept a tax if it is clearly explained and if 100 percent of the money is returned to the public. Not one dime should go to Washington for politicians to pick winners. No lobbyists need be employed.

While not exactly the same implementation, Alaskans benefit financially from the oil revenue-endowed Permanent Fund… a tax on the oil drawn from their lands (which, of course, differs from a blanket windfall tax on companies deriving their profits from Research and Production in foreign countries). However that Fund does require bureaucracy… and Hansen offers little insight on why he believes government would keep their hot little hands off this income.

While many may believe Obama would be apt to support a carbon tax that goes directly, non-stop, to the taxpayers… I don’t. A President Obama – along with cohorts in spending crime, Pelosi and Reid – would absolutely not allow those funds to bypass Congress. They have big spending projects… and those funds would make their eyes light up like a kid’s on Christmas morn.

What is missing from Hansen’s letter is any mention of the earth’s cooling trend. Instead he continues to boldly propagate the “global warming” phrase – avoiding the more vague “climate change” moniker used by so many now. Apparently, Hansen merely believes we have a stay of execution, courtesy of the earth’s oceans. Per his guest op-ed on the WorldWatch site this past June:

But more warming is already “in-the-pipeline,” delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean. And climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a “perfect storm,” a global cataclysm, are assembled.

Gotta give the guy credit for balls, along with his stubborness. But why does Hansen not only ignore the cooling, but also the sun’s influence?

Two weeks before Hansen was to testify front of our gullible Congress this past summer, ScienceDaily was noting the sun’s “silence” on sunspots for a longer period than the more common 11 year cycles. And while Hansen focuses on what he feels he can predict with CO2 and temperatures, he cannot predict the sunspot activity. Nor does he seem to apply the sun’s activity with any notable impact on his findings. But the sun does indeed have an effect on the earth’s weather… as The Daily Tech science blog stated back in Feb 2008:

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago — and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call the “Little Ice Age.”

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a “stethoscope for the sun,” Tapping says, if the pattern doesn’t change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.

Back in 2005, when global warming fear was “heating up” frenetically, other scientists were predicting global cooling.

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to “stock up on fur coats.” Sorokhtin, who calls man’s contribution to climate change “a drop in the bucket,” predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

Observational data seems to support the claims — or doesn’t contradict it, at least. According to data from Britain’s Met Office, the earth has cooled very slightly since 1998. The Met Office says global warming “will pick up again shortly.”

Others aren’t so sure.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding “excellent correlations” between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn’t exist between CO2 and past climate changes. According to Patterson. we shouldn’t be surprised by a solar link. “The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet,” he says.

Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

Just as in the late 70s, when the cry was raised about a coming ice age and Mother Nature did an about face with a warming trend, it appears only time is going to tell whether the predictions of continued cooling, or warming, come to pass. One thing certain can be said… climate *does* change… with or without man. And despite all our best intentions or technology, this planet will eventually be uninhabitable for any species in the future. In the interim – just as in epochs past – life on earth will morph… some species becoming extinct, others evolving into a new species.

Tho global warming advocates say the apocalypse has been postponed, they have not postponed the education propaganda machine. With much to gain financially from government legislation in all countries – and perhaps only a narrow window in which to do so in an increasingly cold world – the global warming advocates are resurging in their ad/fear campaign. And now, as disgruntled Sierra Club’s David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, so aptly demonstrates, they are displaying their successful indoctrination of our youth… using them to tout the even more extreme “runaway global warming”.

Wonder how those young kids will feel if they’re frantically stoking their alternative energy stoves trying to keep warm in the future? Will they look back to their participation in this commercial and recognize they were taken for fools by their teachers and the education system?

On the flip side, there are some media pundits… no doubt doing their fair share of shivering and snow shoveling themselves… now penning their skepticism. One such example is The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker in his piece today, 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

…masking the underlying warming trend??

It’s gotta be a tough go right now… touting global warming with any credibility in the midst of weather so obviously the opposite. I’d say the onslaught of doom will be stepping up it’s advertising campaign during such adverse conditions. After all, the real agenda is to drive thru legislation that financially benefits some of the world’s heavy hitters. And apparently the more snowy cold winters the world has, the more snow the resorts get, the more likely it is they will be viewed as crackpots.

And boy do I look forward to that day….

Now one can only hope there are no drastic moves taken by the US Congress and a new President… who seems to hang on Hansen’s every word.