By Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D.

Even before our record heatwave subsided this week, politicians and journalists were ramping up their all-purpose explanation: “Global Warming.” Warming it was; Global it was not. When Portland hit 106 on Tuesday, it was 61 in San Francisco, 70 in Santa Barbara, and 79 in Los Angeles. Frequently hot Pendleton was only 101, far from the record high for the Northwest of 119 set there in 1898.

Charlatans use every opportunity to promote climate hysteria, claiming that the global temperature is rising inexorably. Yet they overwhelmingly lack training in physics and meteorology. And the best satellite data show that the earth as a whole has been gradually cooling for a decade. They love “green science” because it is wonderfully suited to selling expensive climate “solutions” to the scientifically challenged. Never mind that it is neither green nor science, just politics. Never mind that climate variations are perfectly natural and unstoppable. An army of propagandists say that man is
the culprit, and carbon taxes are the solution.

If President Obama’s climate agenda passes, expect the problem to slowly fade because it never existed in the first place and few will tolerate escalating energy prices that dramatically lower our standard of living. Will those who have led this scam face a day of reckoning like Bernard Madoff? Unlikely. They will just blame some underling, preferably deceased, for deceiving them!

Real science is based on real evidence that can be independently verified, not on testimonials from those funded by politicians. Real evidence of climate change is easy to find. Real evidence that man caused it via greenhouse gases is completely missing. Man does cause local warming through urbanization. This biases many terrestrial temperature records, providing fodder for alarmists.

The real causes of global climate change are variations in the earth’s orbit, in output from the sun, and in ocean surface temperatures. Computer models touted by alarmists are instructed to be overly sensitive to greenhouse gases. Real sensitivity is small and its effects minimal. These computer games cannot reliably project climate, and the anthropogenic “hot spot” they predict in the tropical troposphere is not observed.

Although Arctic sea ice extent has fractionally declined, global sea ice has shown no trend for 30 years; the Greenland ice-sheet has thickened, the Arctic and Antarctic are cooler than 50 years ago; northern hemisphere winter snow cover reached its greatest in 2007; the Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 squarekilometers; hurricane landfalls show no trend for 100 years; and tropical cyclone activity is at a record low.

This comes from a new assessment by prominent physicists. Previously, 31,478 scientists signed a petition objecting to Global Warming hysteria, including 9,029 of us with PhDs. The problem with allowing politicians and journalists to hijack science is not only that they might sell us economic disasters like “Cap and Trade,” but that we miss what is really going on: the earth is cooling. In addition to the atmosphere cooling, our oceans, which contain the vast majority of mobile heat on earth, are also cooling. This is a stunning new development reported by the ARGO array of deep-sea diving buoys and completely at odds with computer models. The Pacific Decadel Oscillation has swung negative, the Atlantic is swinging cooler, and sea level has stopped rising. Our Sun has been unusually quiet, and physicists from the National Solar Observatory predict subdued solar cycles well into the future.

Memorable heatwaves occur in local regions because our oceans and atmosphere are never in complete equilibrium. In the 19th century, during the “Little Ice Age,” a government ship anchored at Santa Barbara reported a temperature of 133 degrees, which became the record high for the United States for
many years. That heatwave was likely caused by a “Santa Ana” effect, much like our heatwave this week.

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Additional note from Gordon Fulks: This was submitted to the Oregonian and published. As is typical of this newspaper, they rushed through an Op-Ed response from a couple of Reed College chemistry teachers that is full of venom and inaccuracies. I wrote a response to that and posted it at that location. 

We were highly effective at blocking the Governor’s Cap and Trade legislation.  We just showed up at hearings in Salem where the Committee chairwoman had boasted that there were no scientists who opposed Global Warming.  In fact, the only scientists who showed up opposed Global Warming.  She could not get any scientific supporters to show up except when public input was not allowed!  And the one who showed up was the infamous Phil Mote who replaced George Taylor as State Climatologist.