Okay, I know many of you will probably not read this. That's fine even though I would be a much happier person if you did. I admit some of this is a little dry and boring but some of it is very interesting. You all know I rail against the global warming crowd. Can I stand here and offer you definitive evidence that temperatures are not changing? No I cannot. That's because they are changing. That's what people do not understand. Global temperatures--which contribute to weather patterns, ice thickness and seasonal anamolies--are CYCLICAL!!!! It's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years! Here are some excerpts from an article which was done by a collaboration of some pretty smart folks. If you'd like I will send you a link to the entire thing. Yes ice is getting thinner in some areas but how do we account for the fact that it is thicker in others? Please read this...please please please!
Precedent:In the 1970's concerned environmentalists like Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado feared a return to another ice age due to manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun.
Since about 1940 the global climate did in fact appear to be cooling. Then a funny thing happened-- sometime in the late 1970's temperature declines slowed to a halt and ground-based recording stations during the 1980's and 1990's began reading small but steady increases in near-surface temperatures. Fears of "global cooling" then changed suddenly to "global warming,"-- the cited cause: manmade atmospheric pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect.
What does geologic history have to offer in sorting through the confusion?
Quite a bit, actually.
Periods of Earth warming and cooling occur in cycles. This is well understood, as is the fact that small-scale cycles of about 40 years exist within larger-scale cycles of 400 years, which in turn exist inside still larger scale cycles of 20,000 years, and so on.
Earth's climate was in a cool period from A.D. 1400 to about A.D. 1860, dubbed the "Little Ice Age." This period was characterized by harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a drier climate. The decline in global temperatures was a modest 1/2° C, but the effects of this global cooling cycle were more pronounced in the higher latitudes. The Little Ice Age has been blamed for a host of human suffering including crop failures like the "Irish Potato Famine" and the demise of the
medieval Viking colonies in Greenland.
Today we enjoy global temperatures which have warmed back to levels of the so called "Medieval Warm Period," which existed from approximately A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1350.
"...the Earth was evidently coming out of a relatively cold period in the 1800's so that warming in the past century may be part of this natural recovery." -
Dr. John R. Christy (leading climate and atmospheric science expert- U. of Alabama in Huntsville) (5)
Playing with NumbersGlobal climate and temperature cycles are the result of a complex interplay between a variety of causes. Because these cycles and events overlap, sometimes compounding one another, sometimes canceling one another out, it is inaccurate to imply a statistically significant trend in climate or temperature patterns from just a few years or a few decades of data.
Unfortunately, a lot of disinformation about where Earth's climate is heading is being propagated by "scientists" who use improper statistical methods, short-term temperature trends, or faulty computer models to make analytical and anecdotal projections about the significance of man-made influences to Earth's climate.
During the last 100 years there have been two general cycles of warming and cooling recorded in the U.S. We are currently in the second warming cycle. Overall, U.S. temperatures show no significant warming trend over the last 100 years (1). This has been well - established but not well - publicized.
Each year Government press releases declare the previous year to be the "hottest year on record."
The UN's executive summary on climate change, issued in January 2001, insists that the 20th century was the warmest in the last millennium. The news media distribute these stories and people generally believed them to be true. However, as most climatologists know, these reports generally are founded on ground-based temperature readings, which are misleading. The more meaningful and precise orbiting satellite data for the same period (which are generally not cited by the press) have year after year showed no warming.
Dr. Patrick Michaels has demonstrated this effect is a common problem with ground- based recording stations, many of which originally were located in predominantly rural areas, but over time have suffered background bias due to urban sprawl and the encroachment of concrete and asphalt
( the "urban heat island effect"). The result has been an upward distortion of increases in ground temperature over time(2). Satellite measurements are not limited in this way, and are accurate to within 0.1° C. They are widely recognized by scientists as the most accurate data available. Significantly, global temperature readings from orbiting satellites show no significant warming in the 18 years they have been continuously recording and returning data (1).
Has manmade pollution in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases caused a runaway Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming? Before joining the mantra, consider the following:
The idea that man-made pollution is responsible for global warming is not supported by historical fact. The period known as the Holocene Maximum is a good example-- so-named because it was the hottest period in human history. The interesting thing is this period occurred approximately 7500 to 4000 years B.P. (before present)-- long before human's invented industrial pollution.
Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28% of the "greenhouse effect" (Figure 2).
Anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises about 0.117% of this total, and man-made sources of other gases ( methane, nitrous oxide (NOX), other misc. gases) contributes another 0.163% .
Approximately 99.72% of the "greenhouse effect" is due to natural causes -- mostly water vapor and traces of other gases, which we can do nothing at all about. Eliminating human activity altogether would have negligable impact on climate change.
Here are some nice quotes to consider:"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." - Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global warming theory)(in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989)
"In the United States...we have to first convince the American People and the Congress that the climate problem is real." -
former President Bill Clinton in a 1997 address to the United Nations
"In the long run, the replacement of the precise and disciplined language of science by the misleading language of litigation and advocacy may be one of the more important sources of damage to society incurred in the current debate over global warming." -
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen(leading climate and atmospheric science expert- MIT) (3)
"Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I've been critical of global warming and am persona non grata." -
Dr. William Gray(Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado and leading expert of hurricane prediction )(in an interview for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 28, 1999)
"Science should be both compelling and widely accepted before Federal regulations are promulgated."
- Dr. David L. Lewis(27-year veteran of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency andcritic of the agency's departure from scientific rationale in favor of political agenda)(in an interview for Nature Magazine, June 27, 1996)
"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are." - Petr Chylek(Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia)Commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland's glaciers are melting.(Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001) (8)
Temperature Records:Because accumulating layers of glacial ice display annual bands which can be dated, similar to annual rings of a tree, the age of ice core samples can be determined. Continuous ice cores from borings as much as two miles long have been extracted from permanent glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica, and Siberia. Bubbles of entrapped air in the ice cores can be analyzed to determine not only carbon dioxide and methane concentrations, but also atmospheric temperatures can be determined from analysis of entrapped hydrogen and oxygen.
Based on historical air temperatures inferred from ice core analyses from the Antarctic Vostok station in 1987, relative to the average global temperature in 1900 it has been determined that from 160,000 years ago until about 18,000 years ago Earth temperatures were on average about 3° C cooler than today.
Except for two relatively brief interglacial episodes, one peaking about 125,000 years ago (Eemian Interglacial), and the other beginning about 18,000 years ago (Present Interglacial), the Earth has been under siege of ice for the last 160,000 years.
