Posted on 05/09/2003 2:05:54 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
PONTEFICATIONS
IS POLLUTION UNNATURALLY HEATING OUR CLIMATE and speeding us towards a global Greenhouse Effect catastrophe of rising seas, giant hurricanes, widespread droughts, famines, plagues and war?
Yes, say the leaders of France and Germany, who cited America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a prime reason to deny us their help in liberating Iraq.
This Kyoto agreement imposes high taxes on fossil fuels (e.g., Iraqi oil) and emission limits on carbon dioxide, a gas produced by burning fossil fuels that is widely blamed as the prime cause of greenhouse warming and “record-high temperatures” during the late 20th Century.
But what is Mother Earth’s natural and normal temperature? Galileo invented the first thermometer only 410 years ago, in 1593. German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit created the mercury thermometer in 1714, and these devices took more than a century to come into widespread use.
Today we talk fearfully about global warming, but we have been taking Earth’s temperature with our crude instruments for only a brief time. If we had a record of our planet’s climate variation over, say, the past 1,000 years, allowing us to see her natural range of chills and fevers, would we be rushing to adopt Kyoto’s extreme, economy-crippling measures because of a few purported years of warm weather?
The good news is that we possess such a thousand-year temperature record, as compiled in a new study by climate scientists at Harvard, the University of Delaware and elsewhere, funded in part by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. It combines the findings of more than 240 scientific reports, most of them published within the past five years.
This study, Restructuring Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal, compares the data recorded by many of Mother Nature’s own “thermometers,” called by the study authors “proxy records.” What are these? They include the ratios of isotopes in the layers laid down year by year in ocean bottom sediments and Greenland’s ice, the growth patterns in ancient tree rings, deposits in annual mud layers reflecting the mix of pollen from flowers that grow and bloom – as well as the mix of microorganisms that live or die – at different temperatures, and much more. This study also includes indirect human recordings of temperature – such as priestly or royal records of severe weather, or of the date on which a pond froze or the first snow fell or last snow melted each year. Temperature and climate change can be deduced from such natural and human data.
By weaving thousands of such threads together, Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues have produced heavily-documented evidence of climate change in many parts of the world over the past millennium.
And – much to the surprise of those propagandized to believe in global warming by Kyoto advocates – these scientists conclude from this mountain of evidence that the “warming of the 20th Century across the world seems neither unusual nor unprecedented within the more extended view of the last 1000 years. Overall, the 20th Century does not contain the warmest or most extreme anomaly of the past millennium in most of the proxy records.”
Compared to Earth’s climate over the past 600 years, the 20th Century was warmer. But as Albert Einstein might say, it’s all relative. Climate was actually warmer 1,000 years ago, at the time of Viking exploration, than it has been during our lifetimes. And back then human beings were not causing global warming by burning huge amounts of natural gas or oil. This “Medieval Warm Period” from about 800 to 1300 A.D. was entirely natural.
But from about 1300 to 1900 A.D. Europe and North America were gripped by some of the coldest episodes of climate in perhaps 10,000 years. During this “Little Ice Age,” as I describe in my own book The Cooling (Prentice-Hall, 1976; forward by Senator Claiborne Pell, preface by University of Wisconsin climatologist Dr. Reid Bryson), the River Thames froze so that Londoners could walk from one side of their city to the other across its ice. In America the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore routinely froze shut each winter. The Arctic Ice Pack moved so far south that Eskimos fishing along its edge were witnessed dragging their kayaks ashore in northern Scotland.
Our climate today reflects a warming up out of that Little Ice Age – but is this a harbinger of doom or merely a return to Mother Earth’s normal climate? This new study suggests that the wild aberration of the past 1,000 years is not today’s warming but the abnormal cold of the Little Ice Age now in our rear-view mirror.
Even during the Little Ice Age, years of exceptional warmth such as 1540 were recorded. “The summers in the late 1530s were at least as warm as in the warmest ten years [of the 20th Century]…between 1943 and 1952,” write the study’s authors. But severe chill returned in 1541, bringing Europe very long winters and advancing glaciers.
Climate is distinguished from weather, scientifically speaking, by being a 30-year averaging of temperature and weather. The global warming doomsayers, eager to panic politicians into signing Kyoto, want you to forget that less than 30 years ago during the winter of 1976-77 the Mississippi River froze shut; Buffalo, N.Y., was buried beneath a record blizzard; water pipes were bursting throughout Chicago as the soil froze to a depth of more than five feet; and the topic of the day was whether this was the start of a new Ice Age.
[The last Great Ice Age (caused not by glaciers creeping south, but by snows that stopped melting off in summer and began accumulating winter after winter) at its peak 23,000 years ago had ice 3,000 feet deep where today’s Chicago stands.]
The authors of this new study have provided evidence that today’s climate is within an entirely normal, natural range of variation that may be cyclical. Human pollution might nudge the thermometer up or down a tiny amount, but not necessarily in ways we can predict or control.
A few years ago the issue of “acid rain” was fashionable, and enviro-zealots were demanding that sulfur be removed from all fossil fuels to prevent sulfuric acid rain. Had they succeeded, one unintended consequence would have been global warming. That sulfur in the atmosphere, you see, causes tinier droplets of water to form at the tops of clouds throughout the world. Those tinier droplets increase the albedo of the clouds, their ability to reflect incoming sunlight back into space like giant airborne mirrors. Take away the sulfur and more sunshine will reach the ground and ocean to make our world warmer.
During the next few weeks the U.S. Senate will be debating energy legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to lessen global warming. But what if global warming is being caused not by CO2 but by a slight increase in radiance from our local star the Sun, as a new NASA study suggests? A carbon tax on energy will not cure this…although some politicians will use any pretext to impose a new tax.
Or what if recent global warming is non-existent, a mis-measurement within the margin of error of various factors such as urban heat island effects and accuracy differences between the thermometers of a century ago and today, as some researchers suspect?
Or what if the best way to control Earth’s climate thermostat is not by taxing gasoline but by planting trees to soak up excess atmospheric carbon dioxide? (Where would we get the land to do this? Cut down those “old growth” forests in the Pacific Northwest, whose big trees are growing little, and plant the clear-cut land with fast-growing, carbon dioxide-craving seedlings!)
This column has already told you of NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, America’s most famous “The Sky Is Falling” doomsayer about global warming, and how he no longer blames carbon dioxide but fingers other pollutants as the chief causes of greenhouse warming. What if you are required to pay a $2 per gallon carbon tax for gasoline, and our economy is destroyed by Kyoto rules, and then scientists discover that we were regulating the wrong pollutant all along? That all these sacrifices were useless as well as unnecessary?
As the new Harvard-University of Delaware study makes clear, our understanding of climate is primitive. Our computer models are unable to grasp the complexity of chaotic “butterfly effect” forces shaping next Tuesday’s weather, much less climate decades or centuries from now. (The Weather Service claims near-perfect accuracy in its forecasts – but that is only because it no longer makes firm forecasts. When it says “70 percent chance of rain tomorrow,” it can claim to be correct whether it rains or not.)
We can improve our computer models of global climate, and the U.S. Senate should fund such work (albeit with the understanding that computers will never be fast enough nor sensors widespread enough to make these models perfect). They should also understand that such models will always be subjectively interpreted. As Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climatologist Benjamin Santer recently acknowledged about uncertainties with satellite measurements of global warming, “We find that model/data agreement, like beauty, depends on one’s observational perspective.”
When he was a Leftist Democratic Senator from Colorado, Tim Wirth told an audience of political activists: “We ought to ‘ride’ the global warming issue, because even if it proves wrong it will lead us to make changes we ought to make anyway.”
It’s a horse that many who love higher taxes and more government control remain eager to ride to the socialist utopia they want to impose. If they cared about truth, however, they would recognize that much more research is needed before deciding when and how to respond with government policies to purported global warming that might be natural….or might not even exist at all.
Nations such as France and Germany have their own reasons for trying to rope the U.S. into the serpent coils of Kyoto. These socialist European nations with active Green political parties are already economically crippled by environmentalist regulations and taxes. The only way they can compete with non-Kyoto nations like the United States and Australia is to lure us into the same swamp that mires and hobbles them.
But even most European nations are falling short of meeting the emission limits imposed by Kyoto. The biggest reason, the European Environment Agency announced this week, was increased fossil fuel burning to cope with the past “cold winter.” The brain-dead EU bureaucrats seemed oblivious to the irony that they were missing global warming targets because of the unusual cold.
Thomas Sowell's baptism of eco-activists as "the Green Bigots" carries much truth, but it really ought to be amplified with an extra modifier: "the Green Eco-Nazi Bigots." Then we'd have a proper label for these folks that want to lock us all into cells so there'll be security for the bugs and the moss.
Hey, where were the eco-protests when the deliberate extinction of the smallpox bacillus was being discussed? Talk about an endangered species!
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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