Global Warming

There are enviro-nazis who blame mostly Americans for global warming. That’s a handy strategy when your goal is to destroy the industry, and strangle the economy, of the U.S. They are accomplishing this by passing draconian anti-business laws and regulations, and signing international treaties that give away American sovereignty.

But is the global warming concept of these people correct? Are humans responsible for the fluctuations in earth’s temperatures?

Al Gore believes that, “Scientists conclude – almost unanimously – that global warming is real, and the time to act is now.” “[W]e are in the process of altering global temperatures by up to three or four times that [1 to 2 degrees Centigrade] amount…” (pg. 73) “[T]he artificial global warming we are causing threatens…to destroy the climate equilibrium we have known for the entire history of human civilization (pg. 98).”

Well, Mr. Gore, there are Nobel Prize winning scientists who would disagree with your concept of global warming – quite unanimously. But he’s got that covered too. On page 89 he says, “The argument –[about what’s causing global warming] to the extent that there is one anymore among reputable scientists…” In other words; scientists who disagree with him don’t count because they’re not reputable. The Nobel Prize committee didn’t seem to think they were so disreputable, and the 15,000 scientists in the Cooler Heads Coalition probably consider themselves reputable. More Gore…

“The insistence on complete certainty about the full details of global warming—the most serious threat we have ever faced—is actually an effort to avoid facing the awful, uncomfortable truth: that we must act boldly, decisively, comprehensively, and quickly, even before we know every last detail of the crisis.”

“If, when the remaining unknowns about the environment challenge enter the public debate, they are presented as signs that the crisis may not be real after all, it undermines the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take.”

In other words, “If some scientists have proof that global warming isn’t completely caused by humans, and the drastic measures we want to use to remedy the situation are heavy-handed, or next to useless, just forget about ‘em.. And trash ‘em in the media. We’re going to do what we want, anyway.”

Throughout the history of earth, temperatures have risen and fallen without any help from humans. A much-publicized heat wave in Colorado in July of 2000, turns out to be only the 5 th hottest on record. The winner turns out to be July of 1874.

A hundred years ago in 1899 we had a winter that was so severe that the Mississippi River dumped ice into the Gulf of Mexico. According to NOAA it was, “an event never before witnesses within the memory of man.”

A thousand years ago, earth warmed up so much that my Norwegian ancestors colonized Greenland, and Britain had lush vineyards. (British wine? Good grief!) A subsequent mini ice-age wiped them out, and the colonists too.

After Galileo perfected the telescope, he studied the sun and particularly sunspots, until they diminished away. Right after this happened is an event called “The Maunder Minimum” in which there were hardly any sunspots. It lasted for 70 years and coincided with a global cooling that caused extreme winters, crop failure, droughts, and starvation. Jakub Niedzwiedz said in Climate Dynamics and the Global Change Perspective, “It has been proposed that his period also represents a period of general global cooling due to lowered solar radiation.” Lowered solar radiation.

Does the amount of heat from the sun vary, and can it have an effect on earth’s temperatures? To find out, we sent up a satellite that measures it, and we’ve been compiling data since 1978. The results? “There’s no doubt that the sun varies. But the bulk of the radiation, 99% as we can measure, stays mostly the same,” says Gary Rottman, a senior research associate at Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics. A 1% fluctuation might not seem like much, but coming from the sun – it’s enough.

Due to the fluid state of the sun, it goes through cycles of increased and decreased radiant output, prominences, flares, magnetic burst and solar wind. We happen to be at a time of increased activity right now.

Two hundred years ago, Ben Franklin established a magazine called The Farmer’s Almanac. It was able to predict weather changes incredibly accurately. A few years ago the folks at the magazine finally told us the secret to their ability to forecast weather – an extensive compilation of the increase and decrease of sunspots and their subsequent effect on the weather.

Is the sun the only major player in changing earth’s temperatures?

We’ve all heard about “El Nino” and the weather changes it brings. (For those of you east of “out west,” Nino is pronounced “NEEN-yo” not “NEEN-o.”) It is caused by the ocean warming up in the west pacific. Guess what? 600 miles NW of Easter Island, geophysicists recently discovered 1,133 unknown volcanoes covering an area the size of New York. Some are a mile and a half tall. This is the world’s greatest concentration of active volcanoes on earth. They’re right under the part of the ocean that keeps warming up to form El Ninos.

In the March 1999 issue of Discover magazine is an article about underwater volcanoes. When a volcano erupts underwater it creates a huge amount of boiling water that can form a disk-shaped mass of rotating hot water 10 miles wide, or wider. These “mega-plumes” can last for months and travel hundreds of miles.

And 80% of all volcanic eruptions occur underwater. With volcanism on the rise on land, just think what’s going on underwater.

There’s a man named Robert W. Felix who wrote a book called Not by Fire but by Ice in which he says that we’re not going into runaway global warming (as on Venus), but instead we’re heading into another ice age. He says that with the oceans warming up due to volcanism, the extra moisture in the air will cause huge snowstorms.

Back around 1975 there was a record amount of snow on Mt. Rainer. Over seventy feet! Here in Washington we had such huge amounts of snow during the 2001-02 winter that some mountain passes were not able to be opened until way later than they’d ever been opened before. In January of 2004, in the Columbia Basin area, many low temperature records were broken with a particularly bitter arctic blast (-31 degrees!). In March of 2003, Anchorage had a record 29” of snow in one day.

Mr. Felix says the reason there’s so much volcanism lately is because we’re going through a “pole reversal.” This happens every once in a while, and is caused by a weakening of the earth’s magnetism, which results the magnetic poles switching places. Earth’s magnetism then grows back to normal.

There’s an interesting article in Discover magazine (April, 1999, pg 25) that might shed some light about global cooling. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute found that cosmic rays from exploding stars hit our atmosphere and collide with atoms. This helps trigger cloud formations, which reflect sunshine back into space.

When these cosmic rays hit carbon in our atmosphere it makes radioactive carbon 14. This leaves a record of cosmic bombardments in earth’s sediments. During the little ice age, 1300 to 1850, Mr. Svenmark found that carbon 14 levels “went up by almost a factor of two.”

Washington’s ex-governor, Dixy Lee Ray, an elected official who was actually an intelligent, well-educated scientist, blasted the concept of shutting down the economies of the Western world to reduce carbon dioxide. When she testified before Congress she admitted that humans do produce 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. “This seems like an enormous amount until we consider the contribution from nature – about 200 billion tons annually.