Tag Archives: global cooling

Global Warming

Does it Matter if Alleged Climate Change is Alleged to be Human-Caused?

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Three things happened recently to prompt this plea for clearer thinking on the issue of alleged climate change.

  1. A fund-raising letter from the Environmental Defense Fund, a once fine environmental policy think tank that has lost its way on “Global Warming”, which was the subject of the letter.
  2. Paul Jacobs Common Sense column, which focused on disagreement on natural vs. human basis for alleged climate change.
  3. Several of the comments on Bjorn Lomborg’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on Climate Change Alarmism focused on human vs. natural causation.

By the way, as an economist, I don’t have a noteworthy opinion on the physical science of climate change. As an environmental economist (before I jumped into school system reform studies), I can see that there is a lot less agreement among climate scientists on this issue than the mainstream media outlets argue. For example, climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer laments: “Two scientists can examine the same data and come to exactly opposite conclusions about causation.” And the unscientific basis for widely-assumed human causation depresses Dr. Spencer.

What depresses me is the continued failure to focus on the central issue, which is the ability to cost effectively address the issue. Instead, there is a lot of focus on the nearly irrelevant causation issue. Suppose scientists detect a huge meteor on a collision course with earth. Can you imagine someone saying ignore it because it is not human-caused? Suppose another ice age is imminent? We wouldn’t worry about cause. We’d be doing benefit-cost analysis on ways to warm things up. If/when catastrophic warming becomes imminent, we’d better stop the finger-pointing and focus on cooling strategies, or lacking cost-effective cooling strategies, we’d better invest in go-it-alone, no-regrets strategies and adaptation to a warmer planet. In this period of uncertainty and controversy about the scope of the threat and cost-effectiveness of feasible strategies, serious people will give special attention to the many available policies that reduce methane and fossil fuel emissions as a side benefit to already attractive policies from other perspectives (= no regrets). One of those is the challenge to eliminate costly shortages of highway space. The popular term for such “shortages” is traffic jam, which are very costly just for the delay they cause, not to mention vehicle wear and tear, increased air pollution, and over-building of roads to meet the demand at a direct price of zero. The ECO 101 cause of all shortages is setting price too low. At rush hour, “free”-way is too cheap.  Economic illiteracy is often very costly.

Global Warming

Reduced Sunspots Increases Global Cooling

Reduced periods of sunspot activity correlate with cooler and very cold periods, with higher incidences producing opposite effects — according to a recent study, highlighted by Larry Bell.

If a leading theory regarding why this occurs is correct, a weaker magnetic heliosphere surrounding our Solar System evidenced by low sunspot activity permits more cosmic rays from deep space to enter Earth’s protective magnetosphere and atmosphere. This increased flux of heavy electrons — or “muons” — striking the atmosphere produces increased cloud cover, in turn reflecting more solar radiation away from Earth and back to space.

While the Sun was exceptionally active during the 20th century, many scientists believe that this condition is now coming to an end. Although the Royal Observatory of Belgium’s July average monthly sunspot count increased slightly for the sixth straight month despite a rare mid-month spotless day, solar Cycle 24 still remains to be the weakest in 100 years.

It is predicted that increased counts may continue for a few more months before activity once again begins to fade. In fact, long-term indicators suggest that the next sunspot cycle will be much weaker than this one. If so, as with other extended periods of inactivity as occurred during Cycles 3, 4, and 5 which marked the beginning of a “Dalton Minimum”, we can expect the past 18 years of flat global temperatures to become significantly cooler.

Global Warming

More Evidence of Global Cooling from NCA Report

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According to the network of nationwide thermometers monitored by the United States Historical Climatology Network, James Taylor noted that 2014 so far has been the coldest year for the United States ever, at least through May 6. Taylor writes,

Assertions that warming temperatures in the United States are causing a host of problems are soundly contradicted by the objective temperature data.

Soon, the more recent period of no global warming will be longer than the older period of actual warming, which lasted approximately 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Preceding that were 30 years of global cooling, generating alarms regarding a new ice age (which is actually overdue, given historical climate cycles). Even Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, conceded in December, 2012 that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 21 plus years with no global warming.

The foundation for the establishment’s argument for global warming is nothing more than broad theory, which does nothing to specify how much and when warming occurs, even with 73 climate models collected by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The problem is that the warming trends projected by these models are all diverging farther and farther from the real world trend of actual temperature observations.

The NCA states:

The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

But there is no proof of this basic declarative statement in the entire 841 pages of the report. Instead, the incontestable truths explained above show that the global warming of the past 50 years was 20 years of warming from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, preceded by roughly 30 years of global cooling, followed by almost 20 years of no warming, despite record acceleration during this time of human carbon dioxide emissions.

The NCA asserts that:

As these data records have grown longer and climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed.

Such a blatantly false statement in an official U.S. government report that cost taxpayers $7 billion of whitewashing over 3 years is shameful. As incontestably explained above, the climate model projections have only grown farther and farther from reality over the past 34 years actually, particularly during the last 17 plus years of no global warming.

These climate models, with projections that cannot even replicate the past, have again been falsified by real world temperature data. So to say that over time, as “the climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed,” would be fraudulent if the statements had not been so transparently penned by PR flacks with no idea of any actual “climate science,” let alone the incontestable climate science truths explained above.

Global Warming

The Global Warming Uncertainty: Is “Doing Something” More Ethical Than “Doing Nothing”?

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However great your task or the challenge ahead, it’s better to do something rather than nothing. We may only be as small as a grain of sand on the beach, but we can make a lasting impact especially if we work together.

— Peter Hawkins

Although Dr. Hawkins was not addressing climatology with his quote, it accurately expresses a common philosophy employed by most environmentalists. Are the skeptics of mankind’s complicities in causing global warming (or climate disruption, or whatever is the term du jour) guilty of negligence in the face of potential global catastrophe? Are the “deniers” who disdain costly regulations over individual liberty guilty of the sin of “doing nothing” when it would be far more ethical “to do something”? Let’s take a look at recent climatological history.

As late as the 1970s, the world’s leading scientists predicted that the earth was headed for an ice age that would wreak havoc on civilization if we were not adequately prepared. Real Science and Popular Technology.net have collected numerous news articles (with their accompanying “scientific” graphs) that predicted a global catastrophe was imminent, lest we do something immediately to prepare for it. Here are just a few:

  • A New York Times article (1/5/78) sported the headline, “International team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere.” While a minority of the climate scientists was not concerned, the majority urged that federal policy be instituted to make preparations. A majority of scientists couldn’t be wrong, could they?
  • A Newsweek article (4/28/75) cites April of 1973 as having produced “the most devastating outbreak (of tornadoes) ever recorded.” It also noted that NOAA’s satellite pictures confirm a “sudden, large increase in northern hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72.” Further, NOAA’s scientists found that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. “diminished by 1.3 percent between 1964 and 1972.” All these examples and more were used as clear and compelling evidence that global cooling was inevitable.
  • The journal Science (7/71) published an article fearing that typical consumer aerosols were contributing to observed global cooling, stating that they “reduce the surface temperature of Earth.” Curbing aerosol use was presumed to help stem the pending global freeze.
  • A CIA report (1974) concludes that the global cooling trend that started in the 1960s has been “confirmed” by science. For the first time, the CIA officially considered a pending climate threat with such a concern that it altered its international relations policies due to the destabilizing political impacts expected to arise from vast crop harvest failures and tremendous population relocations that were sure to follow.

Does this theme of climate alarmism sound familiar? Contemporary science had “concluded” that we were all doomed to a frigid life of local starvation and global political unrest if we did not take immediate and significant actions. Yet what would the world have look like today, had we felt compelled then to “do something — anything” at the time, based on the best available research promoted by an impressive consensus of scientists?

What if we had employed the actions promoted by concerned climate activists, such as covering the arctic ice cap with black soot, increasing its melting rate in order to maintain the sea levels? Or stockpiling millions of tons of American grains in silos at the expense of exporting it to foreign countries that could not produce enough grain to feed their own people? Or pumping tons of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to counteract the coming freeze by inducing… global warming? Would it really have been more ethical for us to just “do something — anything” in the face of less than universal scientific consensus, in the holy name of saving our planet? I do not think this is what Dr. Hawkins meant when he encouraged us into “making a lasting impact.”