Posted by
Mr. Right(wing) on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 7:14:17 PM
The Earth is warming inexhorably due to mankind's relentless combustion of carbon-based fuels, and unless mankind abruptly alters this behavior, the planet will warm to the point where life as we know it will cease. Such is the "scientific consensus," we are told.
The last time the West's intelligentsia held such overwhelming scientific consensus about anything, Christopher Columbus proved them all wrong by sailing over the horizon. Before that, Copernicus was derided as a heretic for doubting that the planet was the center of the universe. And yet now, in the midst of a second consecutive "coldest winter in memory," one which is already on pace to equal last year's near-record-setting (most since 1966) snowfalls, we are expected to believe in the infallability of the supposed "scientific consensus" that mankind is not only capable of affecting the climate on this vast planet, but that we must rapidly deindustrialize in order to prevent catastrophic global warming.
Running hard against this consensus is a recent report from Russian scientist Gregory Fegel that states that:
Changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. (1)
Can it be true that the Great Consensus is wrong? Can it be that climate alarmists have causation entirely wrong, after all these years, and after some $50B in research?
It appears so.
I had previously posted an article by David Evans, the former rocket scientist who developed Australia's carbon accounting program. In that article, Evans noted that:
Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.
If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. (2)
Evans, formerly a member in good standing of the Great Consensus, showed quite conclusively that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of human combustion of carbon-based fuels could not be the cause of the recent observed warming of the planet. So what, then, is the cause?
The Fegel article (see link below) observes that there are several long-term variations that occur in the Earth's orbit (the tilt of the earth, the shape of it's orbit, and the Earth's 'wobble' upon it's axis). These three variations, known collectively as the Milankovich Cycles, occur over different time frames, with them "intersecting" at regular time frames. (Think of the hands of a watch, with each hand moving at different speeds. It is predictable that all three hands will align regularly at 12:00, 1:05:05, 2:10:10, and so on.)
These "intersections" hold the key to understanding the Earth's climate cycle. Because each of these variations in the Earth's orbit has an impact in the level of solar radiation that can reach the Earth. But only when all three are "aligned" is the planet warm enough for life as we know it.
What does this mean for the planet's climate?
Geologists have long been aware that the planet has, for hundreds of centuries at a time, been almost entirely covered by ice. In fact:
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. (1)
Clearly few would argue that we are currently in an Ice Age. But:
Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at
approximately the same levels which they are at today. (1)
So we are apparently at a crossroads, as observational data seems to indicate a cooling trend began in 2003. Many climate alarmists have busied themselves notifying us that this, too is a symptom of global warming. And some have changed their rhetoric, referring to "climate change" rather than global warming, and proscribing the same solution to the "climate change" as they proffered towards "global warming:" Always, the answer is a reduction in living standards in the West, with slower economic growth, and transfers of what wealth we do create to the innocent poor in the developing world.
Fegel has a different conclusion:
Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW. (1)
And when it does, who will be hurt the most? The "golden billion" who already live in developed countries, with electricity, and heating, and infrastructure? Or the 5 billion others who would have benefitted from the economic growth that we willingly curtailed in order to indulge liberal fantasies about mankind's omnipotence?