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Warm thoughts on climate change Unfortunately, many people have been misled and frightened by politicians regarding climate change. We know from history (something most climate alarmists fail to consult) that the worldwide results of climate warming in the past were not bad at all. The world was much warmer from the 9th to the 13th centuries, and people thrived. Travel and food production were greatly improved, the standard of living all over the world rose, and life was good. London and Venice did not flood. Greenland was agriculturally self-sustaining. Wine grapes and citrus fruit were harvested in England. When the "little ice age" started in the 14th century, that was catastrophic! Weakened by famine due to repeated summers of crop failures, a large proportion of the population of Europe died from hunger and disease. The last deep low of that cooling cycle, the Maunder minimum, was in the 1830s. If you read the historical column in the Trinity Journal, you will note the heavy snowfalls reported 150 years ago. You would be surprised unless you realized that the world was in the process of leaving a deep cooling cycle. The greatest 20th century surge in warming was from 1900 to 1945, hardly likely to have been caused by burning fossil fuels. Warming stopped from 1945 to the early 1970s and again stopped around the year 2000. There has not been significant warming in recent years. In fact, there is evidence that global cooling may have started. 30,000 scientists have signed a petition stating there is no convincing evidence that the release of carbon dioxide is causing or will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere, and there is ample evidence that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide produces many beneficial effects for plant and animal life. Carbon dioxide is a trace element in the atmosphere, and if the quantity is doubled, tripled, or multiplied by 10 it will still be a trace element. Rather than causing global warming, it is now generally acknowledged by climate scientists that carbon dioxide levels rise years after warming begins rather than before, as CO2 held by the warming oceans is released. Ice core samples show that CO2 continues to rise after cooling has set in, as the oceans take longer to cool than the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is stocked with politicians, not climate scientists. Al Gore's science adviser, James Hansen, is an astronomer, not a climate scientist. According to a message given recently to a congressional committee by Dr. John S. Theon, Hansen's former supervisor at NASA, Hansen's computer models of climate are so incomplete as to be an embarrassment to NASA. It is truly a pity that so many folks have been misled by politicians who stand to gain from carbon offset cap and trade companies in which they have a financial interest, or who are using climate hysteria as a means to further their own political agendas.
Readers Comments
Submitted by rriley@dm-tech.net on Fri, 06/05/2009 - 20:20.
I need to make a correction. 1820 to 1830 it was the Dalton minimum. The Maunder minimum occurred roughly 1650 to 1700. These are actually sunspot minimums, but they correspond with times of cold temperatures.
Submitted by geoloe@tds.net on Sun, 06/07/2009 - 20:57.
i agree with the points made by vicki riley altho i am not as well read on the history she quotes. based upon my engineering experience in the space program i was aware that when doing performance testing, temperature sensors could be influenced by the test environment and minor corrections had to be made. in the same way the measured air temperatures for cities over many decades could be affected by changes to the local probe environment. note that air temperatures are difficult to measure and are easily influenced; ie, if your wall temp gage is exposed to the sun it could be grossly in error. it is the same in cities where over many years the air temp probe site is influenced by more paving, high rise buildings and heat generated by a/c's, cars and other heat sources added in the vicinity of the sensor. thus a centuries long history of ever increasing unadjusted average temps would not necessarily indicated city warming; and even if all cities showed similiar trends would not indicate global warming.
spaceship earth's temp is in a careful balance between the absorbed solar energy and the heat radiated to the absolute cold of space. it seems to me that the earth's climate are almost totally controlled by these two; the sun and cold space-not man's campfire, forest wild fires, volcanic eruptions, power plants/automobiles or even H-bomb blasts. on the other hand i have seen the retreat of huge glaciers in glacier bay alaska over the past 40 years so there must be reasons for this. since the temperature of outer space does not change it must be changes in the energy output/absorption from the sun. it is an observed fact that the suns energy does vary whereas the energy absorption for our planet of mostly water is relatively constant. since shoreline developments and low lying areas near the oceans are not flooded as predicted by the global warming alarmists i choose to believe that there are natural solar cycles that control the global climate much more than the actions of man. this is not to say that we should abuse and neglect the environment but it is to say that the current grossly misguided global warming theory should not be used by governments to control personal freedom. get on the internet-who would have thought that entrupenuers could make a business of carbon credits-is this a great age or what? Post new comment |
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