UPDATE: As Art and I have both written, snowcover has been increasing not decreasing. In fact Rutger’s snow lab shows this December set a record for Northern Hemispheric snowcover.
When I was a television meteorologist sometimes a hurricane would destroy an area, tornadoes would strike with little or no warming, winter storms would bury cities in snow, floods would inundate communities and temperature records would be broken. People accepted these events as the normal variability that has always confronted and confounded humanity.
Not so anymore. Now when a minimal category one hurricane strikes it’s called “a super storm.” When Washington D.C. is digging out from under two feet of snow it’s given a name like “snowmageddon.” When drought hits the farm belt it’s said to be consistent with predictions that say in a warmer world dry conditions will become more severe. In today’s world virtually any weather event that causes any interruption in the flow of daily life is proof that weather is becoming more extreme due to global warming. Is there really more extreme weather in a warmer world?
When I start a semester teaching meteorology, one of the first things my students learn (hopefully) is that it’s temperature contrast across the earth that drives weather. They learn that the greater the temperature contrast between the poles and the equator, the harder the atmosphere works to equalize that contrast. The way this work is done is with stronger storms. Stronger storms do a better job of transporting heat from the tropics to the polar regions, therefore reducing the contrast in temperature across the earth. In a sense the storms are the earth’s safety valves helping to reduce the pressure so the pipes don’t blow!
In a warmer world with less temperature contrast between the poles and the equator the weather would be less extreme, not more so. In the Northern Hemisphere winter the storms are much more powerful than in the summer. In winter jetstream winds miles above our heads roar at 150 to 200 miles per hour where as in summer they drift along at 20 to 40 miles per hour. Weaker temperature contrast decreases the available energy to make bigger storms and that’s what you would have in a warmer world.
What proof do I have of this claim that weather is less extreme in a warmer world? The answer is in the ice. The ice in glaciers holds a record of earth’s past temperature. Greenland is a great repository of very old ice. Scientists have drilled deep into the ice and have retrieved long cores that can be dated year by year and then analysed to reveal past temperature.
The method of recreating past temperature from ice cores is quite ingenious. Water in the oceans is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But not all water is the same. About 99.8% of all water in the oceans has oxygen with an atomic weight of 16. About 0.2% of the water in the worlds oceans has oxygen with an atomic weight of 18. Oxygen 18 is about 11% heavier than oxygen 16 so it is a little harder to evaporate and once in the clouds it falls out in precipitation a little more readily, depending on temperature. It is this difference between lighter oxygen and heavier oxygen that tells us so much about the temperature of the past.
When the world is warmer, more of the heavier oxygen 18 makes it farther north as snow. When this snow falls onto the Greenland ice cap it is eventually crushed by more overlying snowfall and becomes ice. This ice has a higher concentration of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16. Years, decades and centuries of ice with this higher ratio of oxygen 18 to 16 tell us the earth was warmer. When the earth is colder the heavier oxygen 18 falls out sooner before reaching the colder polar regions like Greenland. The result is that the snow that falls on the Greenland ice cap has a lower concentration of oxygen 18 to 16. In the ice cores this lower ratio tells us the earth was colder when that snow fell thousands of years ago.
So what does this remarkable record of temperature frozen in the ice tell us about past climate and weather? The ice says that when the earth has been colder the climate, and therefore the weather, which is what ultimately makes up climate over the long run, was much more extreme than today, wildly so. The ice age temperature variability is enormous. The Greenland ice core reveals that the temperature range during the ice age was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit! There were periods of time when the temperature would plunge 20 to 30 degrees for thousands of years then suddenly stop falling. After that the temperature would rocket upward in just a few hundred years or just a few decades to where the temperature had been before or even warmer! These were amazingly wild temperature swings. Only the most robust and adaptable of creatures could have survived these massive gyrations of extreme climate change. These gigantic roller coaster temperature swings, in very short periods of time, reduce the changes of the last 100 years to irrelevant insignificance.
In the winter, during the ice age, the temperature over the ice sheet, being a mile above sea level, would drop to perhaps 100 degrees below zero or lower. The temperature in the tropic was still warm so the temperature contrast between the air over the ice and the tropics would have been much larger than today resulting in wild weather extremes. When the ice age ended the contrast in temperature across the earth eased. The result of this decrease in temperature contrast has been far less temperature instability over the last 10,000 years. Temperature has varied by only 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the ice age ended as opposed to 40 degrees during the ice age! The ice core data is telling us that when the earth is warmer there is much less volatility of temperature and therefore the weather that results from that decrease in volatility is much less extreme.
Other than the long term trends in temperature we can derive from the ice cores, our “official” weather records only extend back to 1895 in the United States. There are no weather records of the extremes of weather for 99% of the last 10,000 years. The evidence from the Greenland ice strongly indicates that when the earth is cold the weather is crazy beyond anything we see today with inconceivably large temperature swings back and forth in very short periods of time. This indicates enormous extremes of weather.
So is the weather more extreme today than the past? The answer from the ice is no, not by a long shot.
Dr. Richard Feynman, the great physicist told his students about the scientific method in this class. By his definition the theory of AGW is falsified and should be discarded.
I presented some of the evidence that taken together with that compiled by Marc Morano is more than enough to discredit/falsify global warming.
Here is an interview I did for Nashua CTV Speakupnh. I will add the Hudson video I did with Art Horn when it is released.
Done deal:enlarged. Washington, D.C. to complete warmest year on record in 2012 – Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post
The GHCN station at nearby Beltsville, Maryland says that 2012 is the second warmest year.
But let’s move away from the urban sprawl, to the closest GHCN HCN station in Virginia. November was the coldest on record, temperatures have been declining for 80 years, and 2012 as a whole was below normal. The Washington DC temperature record is thoroughly contaminated by UHI, and is completely useless as a climate indicator.
Alaska is going rogue on climate change....the nation’s icebox is getting even icier.
That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.
Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that’s so 20th Century.
In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Widespread warming
That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”
The cooling is widespread—holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.
The new nippiness began with a vengeance in 2005, after more than a century that saw temperatures generally veer warmer in Alaska, the report says. With lots of ice to lose, the state had heated up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet, in line with rising global greenhouse gas emissions, note the Alaska Climate Center researchers, Gerd Wendler, L. Chen and Blake Moore. After a “sudden temperature increase” in Alaska starting in 1977, the warmest decade on record occurred in the 1980s, followed by another jump in the 1990s, they note. The third warmest decade was the 1920s, by the way.
Too chilly for king salmon?
But now comes cooling. Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska. Some contend the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is harming the state’s king salmon runs, too.
One effect of the oscillation is to weaken the Aleutian Low—a storm-breeding center known for spitting out winter tempests that help regulate weather in the Lower 48. With that low-pressure center above the Aleutians weakened, polar storms raking Alaska from the north linger longer.
People have noticed the new chill in King Salmon, but slightly colder temperatures don’t bother you much when you’re already bundled up for 20-below, said Don Hatten, the National Weather Service forecaster there. Most noticeable was that for the first time last year, the Bering Sea ice shelf extended south nearly to the edge of the Alaska Peninsula, he said.
The single exception to Alaska’s cooling trend came in Barrow along North Slope, where the mercury rose as it has across most of the Arctic. That’s because that northernmost slice of Alaska is secluded from the rest of the state by the Brooks Range, researchers say. Temperatures for the decade were 3.1 degrees higher in Barrow. That trend continued earlier this year, with weeks of above average temperatures in Barrow, apparently driven in part by Arctic Ocean ice melting.
Some like it cold
Will Alaska’s frigid spell last long? The researchers don’t know. The report notes, however, that Alaska endured three decades of relative cold starting in the mid-1940s. Many Alaskans pray the current cold stretch abates sooner.
But Bethel’s Myron Angstman, a pilot, musher and longtime organizer of the Kuskokwim 300 sled dog race, isn’t one of those Alaskans. He’s glad it’s chillier in Southwest Alaska, because increased freezing creates safer trips for mushers, snowmachiners, skiers and others.
Too much warm weather leads to freeze-thaw cycles that create unpredictable layers of ice and hidden water. Even a plunge into a few feet of overflow can prove life-threatening when the subzero temperatures have returned and your snowmachine is stuck—or you’re drenched.
“There’s nothing worse than a winter in rural Alaska with temperatures of 35 degrees,” he said.
Very cold December
Alaska’s cold trend may even be strengthening this winter. National Weather Service meteorologist Shaun Baines reported Saturday that as of Dec. 21, Anchorage had already spent 10 days below zero this month. The city’s average temperature this December is just 5.3 degrees, nearly 8 degrees shy of the December average of 13.2 degrees. Even though warmer air is due by Christmas Day, Anchorage was already enroute to the coldest winter since 1982.
Could it warm up a bit during the second half of Alaska’s winter? Anything is possible, but the National Weather Service in Anchorage recently completed its 90-day forecast and calls for colder-than-normal temperatures at least through the end of March, said meteorologist Dave Stricklan.
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Icecap Notes:
You can see why the cold PDO with cold water off Alaska would result in a cold Alaska.
Richard Keen in an analysis a few years back showed how the Alaska temperatures tracked with the modes of the PDO. The PDO dipped dramatically after 2006 resulting in the cooling decade (the step down) as the article notes.
Hi Joe et al.,
When I did my update study of central Alaska for the Natl. Park Service last year, I found a correlation of r=0.81 between PDO and temperature on 5-year time scales, and an apparent PDO shift to cold
Alaska in 2006-2007. The original 2005 study is posted by NPS, The update should be posted soon. In the meantime, I’ve attached some slides (PDF) on the subject, extracted from a talk I gave a few months ago about “global climate dysfunction”. The bottom line is that for Alaska climate, there’s the PDO and not much else. I’m also sending a different PDO data slide, namely, AK temps compared to the NP index on five-year time scales. The NP is the atmospheric component of the PDO, i.e., mean North Pacific SLP. Enjoy.
Rich
When the Atlantic ocean cools in 5 years or so, the other side of the arctic will cool and the ice will increase dramatically as it did in the 1960s when the AMO dove.
The Obama Gang is stealing our taxes, energy resources, revenues, jobs and economy
An oil and natural gas boom is underway in the United States, born of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” It has created tens of thousands of well-paying jobs directly, and hundreds of thousands more in hundreds of businesses that supply and support the industry and its workers.
In North Dakota, the unemployment rate is 2.4 percent, in large part because of a huge increase in natural gas and crude oil production from deep shale rocks that yielded nothing prior to fracking. The new technology is also driving job growth, higher incomes, and increased tax revenues for hard-pressed state and local governments in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and other states.
Meanwhile, 350 miles north of Edmonton, Alberta, other innovators are producing billions of barrels from oil sands that stretch across an area the size of Utah. Shallow deposits are accessible via surface mining, while deeper lodes are tapped using in situ drilling and steam injection. As work is completed in an area, the land is restored to woodlands, grasslands, lakes and marshes, and the process moves on.
As with fracking, the oil sands create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs and generate billions in revenue, benefitting people from Fort McMurray, Calgary and Vancouver to Ottawa and Halifax, and throughout the United States. Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline would multiply these benefits.
And yet, despite ample evidence that responsible development of these enormous energy resources could power a national economic, manufacturing and employment renaissance, the Obama Administration’s environmental ideologies and political debts to radical green groups could delay or stymie progress.
The new robber barons in the Executive Branch and Congress are not content only with taxing job creators and saddling our children and great grandchildren with trillion-dollar IOUs. They are using hard-earned tax money to finance wind, solar, biofuel and other schemes that primarily reward crony capitalist campaign contributors. They’re also locking up centuries’ of oil, gas, coal and uranium that could generate an economic revival, millions of jobs, and many billions in federal, state and local royalty and tax revenues.
Some say the way these robber barons use, abuse and ignore laws to advance this agenda reminds them of the infamous James Gang, which plundered banks and trains until Northfield, Minnesota citizens ended their lawless ways. Others say a better example is the Chicago based Al Capone mob.
Still others point to the Capitol Hill “fiscal cliff” negotiations, as providing clues as to what lies ahead. President Obama says he favors a “balanced” approach to avoid fiscal calamity, but insists on raising taxes on high income citizens and will not discuss reining in entitlement expenditures that are lead life preservers on taxpayers and our economy. His Treasury Secretary tells us, “There are no options.”
The President’s unique concept of “balance” also defines his “all of the above energy program. Like Humpty Dumpty, his words mean just what he chooses them to mean as in all of the above-ground projects, but none of the below-ground resources. Perhaps the real question is, who is to be master...of our lives, natural resources, nation and pursuit of happiness?
Thus the Administration banned oil development on 1.6 million more acres of federal lands in the West and millions more on the Outer Continental Shelf, while delaying leasing and drilling in still more areas on top of vast acreage and resources that Congress placed off limits through legislation. The ruling czars and robber barons also imposed ethanol in gasoline requirements that turn 40% of the nation’s corn crop into fuel, converting an area the size of Missouri from growing food crops to producing fuel that we could get by drilling, and driving up the cost of countless food products.
Their wind and solar programs waste billions of tax dollars on expensive, unreliable electricity projects that blanket habitats and steal our wildlife heritage, in violation of clear environmental laws.
Meanwhile, EPA issued still more hugely expensive rules that effectively ban the use of coal in electricity generation sending coal’s contribution from 45% a few years ago to 35% today, and killing thousands of mining and utility jobs. Its latest rules demand that the transportation sector slash its soot emissions another 20% ostensibly to reduce asthma, other illnesses and “thousands” of premature deaths.
In reality, the only health or environmental benefits exist in EPA computer models, press releases and cover-ups of illegal experiments on humans, whose response to being subjected to “dangerous” levels of soot actually disproved EPA’s claim that tougher standards are needed. EPA has also ignored the significant health risks caused by its regulations, especially for now unemployed older workers.
In the midst of all this, at the just concluded United Nations climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar, Obama Administration representatives entertained brazen proposals to require developed countries to compensate less developed countries for “climate change damages” under a wealth redistribution scheme that could potentially cost United States taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Also in the works are EPA rules, laws and treaty agreements to force the US to curb fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions.
Inconvenient facts about these decisions were simply ignored or treated much the same way as Steven Spielberg handled his powerful and entertaining Lincoln movie. It was released after the 2012 elections, many believe, so that minority and other voters would learn too late that it was our sixteenth president and other Republicans who championed the end of slavery and northern and southern Democrats who fought to prevent passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing the heinous practice.
The robber barons say whatever is expedient and then pursue policies that undermine the overall public welfare, while postponing many costly and politically explosive actions until after elections.
They also ignore and undermine the recent International Energy Agency forecast that, by 2020, the USA could be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia, currently the largest oil producer on the globe, thanks to advances in seismic, fracking, deepwater drilling and other technologies. A March 2012 Citi Global Problems and Solutions report painted a clear picture of the benefits that domestic energy development could bring – if government “public servants” and environmental “public interest” groups would permit it.
Cumulatively, the new production, reduced consumption and numerous activities associated with these technologies “could increase real GDP by an additional 2% to 3%, creating from 2.7 million to as many as 3.6 million net new jobs by 2020,” the Citi report stated. They could also shrink America’s “current account deficit” by 2.4% of GDP (a 60% reduction in the current budget deficit) and cause the dollar to appreciate in real terms by +1.6 to +5.4% all by 2020.
In the next few decades, Citi concluded, the energy sector “could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalization and reindustrialization of the U.S. economy, creating jobs and bringing prosperity to millions of Americans, just as the national economy struggles to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” It would also “improve national energy security and reverse perennial current account deficits” for decades to come.
However, as the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has made clear, these enormous benefits “are at risk if new restrictions are imposed on the industry, from delays in approval of liquid natural gas exports, to opposition to expanding ports for coal and gas export, to opposition to pipelines and refineries, and to the threat of redundant federal regulations on the technology of hydraulic fracturing.” Worse, foregoing these enormous benefits would bring little or no improvement to the environment or human welfare.
Abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the backbone of the US and global economy. Perhaps one day renewable energy will become a viable alternative to the hydrocarbons that sustain jobs and energize virtually everything we make, ship, eat and do. Until then, America and the world need to promote regulatory sanity and increased production of our enormous base of coal, oil and natural gas resources.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.
It was dry in the American Midwest and hot across central North America this past summer; both triggered ridiculous claims that it was due to global warming. It’s what we predicted they said; trouble is the Earth has cooled since 2000. Claimants only illustrate they don’t understand climate mechanisms or climate history. There’s illogic in many of their claims such as warming bringing more droughts. Warming increases evaporation putting more moisture in the atmosphere increasing precipitation potential.
Actually, the drought cycles in the middle latitudes have little to do with temperature. Similarly current weather patterns are not unusual and easily understood with a brief explanation of the mechanisms.
Weather Extremes Are Normal
Basically the atmosphere has two parts, the cold polar region and the warm tropical region. The illustration shows the Northern Hemisphere, mirrored in the Southern Hemisphere.
Boundary between the two air masses is the Polar Front marked by a temperature contrast which is the greatest in a short distance for any latitude. As a result strongest winds, labeled the Jet stream, and most severe weather are associated. The technical name for the Jet Stream is the Circumpolar Vortex.
Each season the dome expands in winter to approximately 35N and shrinks in summer to 65N. It passes through southern Canada in Spring on its way north and again in Fall on its way south. Storms that ripple along the front bring severe weather and heavy precipitation accompany its passage.
A major feature in the Circumpolar Vortex are large amplitude Rossby Waves identified in 1939 by Carl Rossby. These Waves dominate and dictate the pattern of weather in the middle latitudes yet are still not included in most official explanations of weather.
There are two major flow patterns. Zonal flow has low amplitude Waves with stable weather patterns and generally northwest winds in winter and southwest in summer. Meridional flow has high amplitude Waves with unstable weather, extremes of temperature and precipitation, and winds more north and south in summer and winter.
Both Wave types migrate from west to east on a 4 to 6 week basis. Use a 5 week average and from the point when weather in your area changes noticeably you can expect that new pattern to last 5 weeks.
When the Meridional Wave amplitude deepens, cold air pushes well south, warm air pushes well north and the system blocks. Weather people talk about “blocking highs” or
“omega blocks”, the latter describing the pattern on a weather map. Under these conditions the Wave migration becomes 8 to 10 weeks causing persistence of the existing weather pattern. Dry remains dry as in the western US, and wet remains wet as in Britain this summer. People become nervous knowing from experience problems follow.
Drought Pattern in the Middle Latitudes
Government obsession with global warming meant they virtually ignored precipitation, yet in the short and medium term it is much more important for the human condition. In 2000, 200 top climate people listed the 20 worst climate disasters of the 20th century. 11 of the top 20 were droughts and 5 were floods.
Drought has been an issue since we began farming. We made ourselves vulnerable to the vagaries of weather when we switched from hunter/gathering to sedentary agriculture some 9000 years ago.
Drought fall into 3 broad categories.
• Perennial dryness occurs in hot deserts, such as the Sahara, Atacama, and Kalahari/Namib generally located between 15 and 30 degrees of latitude and cold deserts in the Arctic and Antarctic. The North Pole is one of the driest places on Earth.
• Seasonal dryness occurs in many regions of the world and are known as monsoon climates: summer is the dry season in California; winter in India.
• Intermittent dryness occurs wherever precipitation is below normal for an extended period.
Drought is defined in other ways. Hydrological drought occurs when stream flow or lake and reservoir levels are below average. Agricultural drought occurs when plant growth is limited by inadequate soil moisture, but what’s limiting for one plant is not for another. Shallow-rooted plants using soil moisture in the upper 10 cm are more drought- prone than deep-rooted plants using subsoil moisture. Trees are deep-rooted. A tree species adapted to the dry climate of North Africa might have roots going down 100 meters. Garden annuals are mostly shallow-rooted. Annual commercial crops are somewhere in between. If water is abundant, their roots tend to stay near the surface. When water is scarce, they go looking for it. Studies in Manitoba in the late 1980s drought found wheat roots down 3 meters.
In the U.S.. drought explains 55% of weather-related crop losses: excess moisture 16%; frost 11%: and hail 8%. Canadian numbers vary because of lower temperatures, but not by much. Regional variation shows drought more likely on the Prairies. Because of low precipitation it is a moisture deficit region.
Droughts persist throughout North America history. People are familiar with the 1930s, especially in western Canada, but few know similar droughts occur with varying degrees of severity approximately every 22 years.
Dust storm; Regina, Saskatchewan, April 14, 1933
Source; Western Canada Pictorial Index
Canadian Prairie droughts are an extension of the droughts of the American midwest - something John Palliser understood when he travelled across Canada in 1857 at the beginning of a drought, but that’s a story for another column.
The first person to relate the droughts to a physical phenomenon was A.E. Douglass. He was an astronomer whose main interest was dendroclimatology (tree rings), particularly the relationship between midlatitude precipitation patterns. He published an article in 1920 titled, “Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees”. Later a chart was produced that showed the relationship between sunspots and droughts.
I used his work because I found a similar 22 year drought cycle in approximately 200 years of precipitation data for York Factory on Hudson Bay that correlated with sunspot activity. Theodor Landscheidt later showed the same relationship.
We don’t like the severe weather and especially the hardship it brings, but to exploit that for political gain is unacceptable and wrong. What is going on with today’s weather is not only perfectly normal, but not even close to much more severe weather in the past.
Proof of the effects of the Rossby Waves on middle latitude weather and the cherry-picking is evidenced by what happened in the week of August 20, 2012. Here is a map of record cold, yes I said cold, showing how the Wave pattern shifted, but it didn’t appear in the media because it doesn’t fit the alarmist agenda.
The Mayan calendar is about to end, and with it, the world.
People love nothing more than an apocalypse. Meteor collisions, alien invasions, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, and global warming all provide great material for mass entertainment and breathless news reporting.
The latest apocalypse to capture our imagination is the idea that, along with the Mayan calendar, the world will end on the 21st day of this month. The Mayan “Long Count” calendar, which began in 3114 BC, ends on December 21, 2012. The calendar is supposedly the measure of days from the beginning of humanity to the end. As a result, some doomsayers predict the end of the world in a few days.
Proposed scientific reasons why we won’t have a merry Christmas include ejection of mass from the sun, a sudden switching of Earth’s magnetic poles, a massive meteor collision with Earth, and a sudden shift in Earth’s crust. At this very moment, people across the world are stockpiling guns, machetes, kerosene, matches, sugar, and candles in preparation for the coming disaster. But our National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) assures us that the world won’t end on December 21.
Over that last two centuries, most doomsday threats have been blamed on humanity itself. Consider overpopulation. The Anglican minister Thomas Malthus postulated in 1798 that global population would outstrip mankind’s ability to feed itself, leading to economic disaster. Dr. Paul Ehrlich followed up with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicting that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death during the decade of the 1970s. But the agricultural revolution of the twentieth century and slowing population growth have confounded the predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich.
Other feared manmade catastrophes include killer air pollution, global thermonuclear war, worldwide disease pandemics, economic collapse from passing the production point of peak oil, and disaster from genetically engineered foods. While the jury is still out in some cases, these predicted catastrophes do not appear to be occurring.
But the greatest of all these fears is Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate.
Alarming climate change predictions would fit well with Mayan fears, but they need a little more time. According to economist Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics on the impacts of global warming: “...at we are talking about then is extended world war...People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move...” From environmentalist Bill McKibben: “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has even if we don’t quite know it yet.”
From Dr. James Lovelock: “...before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
What’s amazing is that the theory of dangerous global warming is accepted by the majority of world leaders. Today, the heads of state of 191 of the 192 nations are pursuing policies to try to stop the planet from warming. Most leading universities, NASA and other major scientific organizations, most of the Fortune 500 companies, and the news media accept the pending doom of man-made climate change. The world is spending over $250 billion each year to try to “decarbonize.”
But empirical evidence does not support the theory of catastrophic man-made warming. The 0.7C rise in global temperatures since 1880 was matched one thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than today. Despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Earth’s surface temperatures have been flat to declining for more than 10 years. Arctic ice has been declining, but Antarctic ice, which is 90 percent of Earth’s ice, has been increasing over the last 30 years. Sea levels are naturally rising at 7‒8 inches per century, but no evidence shows that accelerating sea level rise is underway. Hurricanes and tropical storms are neither more frequent nor stronger today than in times past. Polar bear populations have more than doubled in the last 50 years.
So, complete your Christmas shopping and don’t sell your winter coat. The world may end, but not before you have to pay your taxes and your credit card bills.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
