Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Tom Steyer, who ran for president of the United States, are now trying to run me out of town. Abrams, Steyer, and the leaders of 17 large environmental lobbies recently asked Facebook to ban a research group that I direct the CO2 Coalition, made up of 55 climate scientists and energy economists.
The annual budgets of these lobbies total over half a billion dollars, and Steyer alone is worth $1.6 billion. Their alarmist view of our supposedly impending environmental doom predominates in mainstream media, centering on the impact on the earth of emissions of carbon dioxide -a non-polluting, mild warming gas, and an important source of plant and plankton food.
By contrast, the CO2 Coalition’s annual budget is half a million dollars. Like all scientists and economists who ask for any proof of the looming apocalypse, we are excluded from mainstream-media discussion. You might wonder: how did the Steyer-Abrams crowd even notice us, let alone conclude that we posed a threat to their enforced consensus, which calls for an end to the affordable, reliable energy that powers over 80 percent of the world?
The answer is found in the work of a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur named Eric Michelman, who became fabulously wealthy creating a modification of the computer mouse. For more than a decade now, Michelman has devoted his wealth to squelching media debate on climate change - a successful dry run for the cancel culture that we see engulfing many other issues today.
In 2016, Michelman was the founding and lead funder of a group called Climate Feedback, whose purpose is to “fact-check” and label as “false” any and all deviant thoughts about fossil-fueled climate catastrophe. The group has been certified as an unbiased source on climate issues by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which was founded by the Tampa Bay Times and operates the left-leaning PolitiFact. At some point, Facebook turned its censorship oversight over to the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
That’s when our organization’s problems started.
In September 2019, a “false” label appeared on Facebook when the Washington Examiner posted an article I had written there with Dr. Patrick Michaels, our senior fellow and a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists. The op-ed described the poor performance of climate models that had projected alarming increases in future temperatures. The “false” label triggered a wave of censorship from Facebook’s algorithms, blocking reposting and advertising.
The detailed, scientifically referenced letter we wrote to Facebook that soon got the label reversed is almost identical in form and argument to responses this summer to similar Climate Feedback censorship written by environmental writer Michael Shellenberger, Dr. Michaels (after a televised appearance on Fox’s Life, Liberty, and Levin), and climate statistician Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. All of us agree: Climate Feedback is biased, sloppy, and often just flat wrong. For example, in its “fact-checks,” the group blatantly contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s finding that there has been no statistically significant increase in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, droughts, and floods during the carbon emissions era that began with the dramatic industrialization after World War II.
Climate Feedback is Michelman’s third major attempt at promoting climate alarmism and silencing opposing views. First came the Climate Change Education Project, in 2008, followed by the More than Scientists campaign in 2015. When he set up that campaign, Michelman said:
It’s about showing the science is settled. Studies consistently show that 97 percent of scientists agree. We want the public to both hear from them that, yeah, this is settled, but also see scientists for who they are. They’re our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and community members. They’re people with kids, and they’re worried about the future. When they say, “I am concerned about climate change and I think we need to act on it,” you can understand they’re saying it because they have kids just like you do.
Since Michelman had decided that the science was settled in favor of a 97 percent consensus on catastrophe before he even founded Climate Feedback, his group should never have been let into a network of “unbiased” reviewers. And its performance shows why.
I’m all for debating with Climate Feedback. For 15 years as a professor at American University, I invited to my classes on climate statistics and mathematical modeling many of the groups whose leaders signed the recent letter to Facebook calling for us to be banned. But there was no response because the cancel culture doesn’t believe in debate. It believes in silencing its opponents by denying them a platform. We’ll hold on as long as we can. I believe that the truth will out-even against “fact-checkers.”
Dr. Caleb Rossiter is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition.
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Thank you Dr. Rossiter,
I think that it is very important to put names and faces to the ‘Cancel Culture’ that is trying to defeat us with censorship. Note that none have any scientific background and therefore default to strong arm tactics. They cannot afford to let the truth be heard.
Here in Portland, the worst of the worst have turned to rioting, because Race is the hottest topic of the moment, surpassing Climate and COVID-19. And these mostly white folks are at their best when they are at their worst: rioting. Their latest tactic is to scream racist remarks at black Portland policemen. That goes over well!
But more generally, these folks have to be very unhappy about our climate. It has been almost too perfect of late. Due to a northerly flow, we have had trouble reaching normal highs, let alone exceeding them. On July 13, 14, and 15, our record highs (101, 103, and 103 F) were set the very first year records were kept at the new Portland Airport. That was 1941. We were in the 80’s this year. Then in 1942, we set record highs that still stand today of 102 and 105 F on July 1 and 2. We reached 66 and 72 F this year on those dates.
I understand the frustration of the Cancel Culture. Our destroyed downtown is a monument to their overwhelming stupidity.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
London, 20 June: The Global Warming Policy Forum has criticised the Environment Agency for claiming that the UK is no longer a wet and rainy country.
A new report, The Great British Rain Paradox (1), has just been published, warning of potential water shortages in the UK in years to come.
It claims that the major factor for this is climate change. The foreword, written by the CEO of the Environment Agency Sir James Bevan, states:
“Climate change is causing long spells of dry weather that are putting our water resources under increased pressure. May 2020 has been the driest on record and exceptionally dry weather across the south east between 2017 and 2019 led to some of the lowest groundwater levels we have ever seen.”
These claims have no basis in fact.
Official Met Office data shows that the UK has actually been getting wetter in recent decades.
May 2020 certainly was not the driest on record either - in the UK as a whole, it was only the ninth driest since records started in 1862. The driest May was in 1896.
Analysis of regional rainfall data also fails to support Sir James’ claims.
Neither does the claim of exceptionally dry weather in the South East of England stand up to scrutiny. Met Office data proves that rainfall there between 2017 and 2019 was in fact close to average.
There are undoubtedly good reasons why water shortages may occur in future, such as population growth and increased demands. Spurious claims about climate change will simply serve to draw attention away from these very real issues and the failure to expand storage and deal with water leaks.
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“This is not the first time Sir James has been caught playing fast and loose with the facts to support a political agenda (3). He should apologise and issue a correction.”
Notes for editors
1) The Great British Rain Paradox is available here.
3) James Bevan’s speech not supported by scientific evidence - Environment Agency
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Forum
e: peiser@thegwpf.com
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IPCC and Sceptics Agree: Climate Change Is Not Causing Extreme Weather
A new Global Warming Policy Foundation report from retired physicist Ralph Alexander, Ph.D. (Oxford University) supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion there is limited scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change to increases in extreme weather. Alexander’s conclusions are also confirmed by recent documents produced by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and meteorologist Anthony Watts on the Climate at a Glance website.
Alexander’s paper begins by remarking, “"The purported link between extreme weather and global warming has captured the public imagination and attention of the mainstream media far more than any of the other claims made by the narrative of human-caused climate change.” This is odd because data and analyses from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that climate alarmists in academic, political, and media circles continually cite as the authoritative source of information on climate change, confirm that “if there is any trend at all in extreme weather, it’s downward rather than upward. Our most extreme weather, be it heat wave, drought, flood, hurricane or tornado, occurred many years ago, long before the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere began to climb at its present rate,” writes Alexander.
“Recent atmospheric heat waves in western Europe,” writes Alexander, “pale in comparison with the soaring temperatures of the 1930s, a period when three of the seven continents and 32 of the 50 US states set all-time high temperature records, which still stand today.”
Nor has the IPCC discerned or identified any long-term trend in drought patterns, either in the United States or globally. And even though rainfall has modestly increased in recent years, there is no evidence floods are becoming more frequent or severe. Many recent flood events can be traced almost entirely to land-use changes such as channelization, deforestation, the destruction of wetlands, and the building of dams, Alexander notes.
Climate at a Glance: Floods, confirms Alexander’s assessment, citing data showing there has been no evidence of increasing flooding frequency or severity in the United States or elsewhere over the past century and a half. The IPCC states it has “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods, going so far as to say it has “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes. In other words, the IPCC thinks it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.
On top of that, a 2017 study on the impact of climate change on flooding in the United States and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, states, “The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone,” and “Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.”
Alexander notes hurricanes and tropical cyclones show a decreasing trend around the globe, with the frequency of landfalling hurricanes of any strength (Categories 1 through 5) remaining unchanged for at least 50 years. Although the frequency of major North Atlantic hurricanes, which are the most studied, has increased during the past 20 years, the current heightened activity level is merely comparable to the 1950s and 1960s, a period when the Earth was cooling, not warming.
Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes once again confirms Alexander’s hurricane conclusions, citing the IPCC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who report there has been no increase in the number or severity of hurricanes as the planet has modestly warmed. The United States recently went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, experiencing its fewest total hurricanes in any eight-year period. The IPCC’s 2018 Interim Report observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
“Likewise, there is no trend in the frequency of tornadoes in the United States since at least as far back as 1954,” writes Alexander about the absence of changes in tornado trends during the recent period of modest warming. “The frequency of strong (EF3 or greater) tornadoes has even diminished over that interval. The average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40 percent less than from 1954 to 1985.”
“But what about droughts?” alarmists ask. “We know droughts are increasing due to climate change!” Not so, says the data from the IPCC and other research bodies. The IPCC reports droughts are becoming less severe, with the United States benefiting from fewer and less extreme drought events as the climate modestly warms. In 2017 and 2019, NOAA reported the United States has undergone its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.
Similarly, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years, and IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.
Extreme weather events do occur, but they are the result of “natural patterns in the climate system, not global warming,” writes Alexander. He cites in particular the periodic but irregular shifts in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which governs many extremes such as intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin and major floods in eastern North America and western Europe, and El Nino and La Nina cycles in the Pacific Ocean, which often cause catastrophic flooding in the western Americas and severe droughts in Australia. In Europe, recent heat waves have been driven by changes in the jet stream blocking normal weather patterns.
In short, the oft-repeated assertion that weather is getting more extreme is false, with drought, flooding, hurricane, and tornado numbers being well within their normal historic range of severity and frequency. The data show there is no basis for alarm.
--H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Global Warming Policy Foundation; Climate at a Glance: Drought; Climate at a Glance: Floods; Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes
It’s amazing how many people want to use climate change - and the Covid-19 lockdown - as a justification, blueprint or dress rehearsal for reducing global energy use and CO2 emissions, transforming the US and global economic systems, and redistributing the world’s wealth and resources. They’re now claiming the three-month lockdown’s “success” in slashing fossil fuel consumption proves we can do this on a permanent basis, by imposing a global Green New Deal that will be all gain with no pain. My article this week explores these claims, and finds them sorely wanting.
I hope you enjoy it and thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
The Green New Deal dress rehearsal
The Covid-19 lockdown as a blueprint for a permanent economic shutdown to ‘save the Earth’
Paul Driessen
More than 1.4 million cases of Wuhan Coronavirus and 106,000 deaths in the United States alone have accompanied stay-home lockdowns, businesses bankruptcies, over 40 million unemployed workers, plummeting tax revenues and unprecedented debt. Ongoing rioting, vandalism, arson and looting are compounding problems for many cities and minority communities.
But where many see disaster, others see opportunity. Some want to use the crises to enact laws and welfare programs they could never get otherwise. More ambitious activists see the lockdown as a blueprint or dress rehearsal for a total energy, economic and lifestyle transformation to “save the planet.” If three months of Covid lockdowns can reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, they argue, permanent fossil fuel bans are possible, essential and should be undertaken immediately.
Five years ago, former UN official Christiana Figueres said the real goal of climate actions was to “intentionally transform the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” - and replace it with socialist-environmentalist global governance. More recently, she said post-Corona economic stimulus packages should be used to “kick-start” investments “in low-carbon infrastructure projects that will create jobs and put the world on a safer, fairer, more resilient path.” Others want to use climate change as a pretext for dictating how global wealth and resources will be redistributed.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff is on the same page. The Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he said in May 2019. It was “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden and other leading Democrats have endorsed the GND.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes “the pandemic could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines.” His environment chief thinks COVID-19 presents “a chance to do capitalism differently.” The UN Green Climate Fund says it “offers an opportunity to direct finances towards bolstering climate action
and “re-launch[ing] economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories,” to control climate and weather and prevent massive extinctions.
In short, echoing former Obama science advisor John Holdren, they want the United States and other modern societies to de-develop and de-industrialize, establish low-consumption life styles that ensure “more equitable distribution of wealth,” and tell poor countries how much “ecologically feasible” development they will be permitted to pursue.
Perhaps most important, these “visionary” ruling elites will be in charge. They will define what is clean, green, renewable, sustainable, ecologically feasible, safer, fairer, more resilient. They will demand less travel, trade and commerce - for the masses. They will live quite well, while telling today’s oilfield and factory workers their industries must disappear and they must be content with minimum-wage jobs installing, maintaining and dismantling wind turbines and solar panels made overseas.
Fans and implementers of Covid-19 lockdowns have been oblivious to the economic, societal and human devastation caused by the lockdowns: not just economic losses, depleted savings and ruined dreams, but millions of cases of depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, obesity, stroke, heart attack, thousands of deaths from these causes, and suicide and murder attributable to the lockdowns.
Add to that millions of future or still uncounted deaths and disabilities from missed biopsies, skipped cancer screenings and chemotherapy, missed early treatments for stroke and heart-attack patients, and organ transplants simply not performed - because “non-essential” medicine was closed down, people lost their health insurance, or patients were afraid to go to clinics and emergency rooms.
Many hospitals, clinics and practices lost so much money that they may have to close their doors. The cumulative long-term impact from that on healthcare, life spans, and death tolls among obese, diabetic, elderly and severely ill patients could be enormous. These human costs will take years to manifest themselves and be calculated. Indeed, the ultimate cost of the lockdown could be worse than the virus.
We still do not have reliable data on Covid infections, cases and deaths - and don’t know whether deaths were due to Corona, or merely associated with the virus and primarily due to age or serious underlying health problems. We don"t even know how many vulnerable elderly people died from Covid complications inflicted on them by decisions by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other officials to force nursing homes to accept recovering Corona patients and keep Covid-infected staff working in those facilities.
All this is from lockdowns lasting several months. Suggestions that we “transform” our economy with expensive, unreliable, weather dependent energy - and endure energy, employment, healthcare and other deprivations in perpetuity - border on homicidal insanity. They would postpone or eliminate any economic recovery, result in unimaginable misery and death in now-developed countries - and condemn tens of millions of people in still impoverished nations to horrible suffering, disease, starvation and death.
As to saving the planet and ensuring “ecologically feasible” development, GND energy systems would be vastly more devastating to scenic areas, habitats and wildlife - and to human health and welfare - than any likely effects from manmade portions of future climate changes or weather events.
As Michael Moore’s new film, “Planet of the Humans,” dramatically demonstrates, wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies are the antithesis of clean, green, renewable and sustainable. Even worse, the ecological devastation it documents is happening in a world that is still 81% dependent on oil, natural gas and coal, 4% on nuclear and 7% on hydroelectric. The impacts and species losses would be orders of magnitude greater if we were 100% dependent on pseudo-renewable energy sources.
Adopting UN-AOC energy prescriptions would require literally millions of 800-foot-tall wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of half-ton batteries, thousands of biofuel plantations and clear-cut forests, billions of battery-powered vehicles, and thousands of new and expanded mines to provide tens of billions of tons more metals and minerals. The ecological impacts would reach every corner of every continent. Hundreds of bird, bat, reptile and mammalian species would disappear. Household, hospital, school, business and factory electricity costs would skyrocket. Jobs and industries would vanish.
Those prescriptions would also make the United States enormously dependent on China, not just for medical devices and pharmaceutical components - but for metals, raw materials and component parts needed in wind turbines, solar panels, backup power batteries, and defense, aerospace and high-technology applications. And all that mining and manufacturing, in Asia and other distant lands, would require fossil fuels, at levels far beyond anything seen in history, under minimal to nonexistent pollution, workplace safety and human rights laws, accompanied by prodigious emissions of carbon dioxide.
Fans and implementers of GND transformations are willfully oblivious of these realities. They refuse to discuss them or allow others to discuss them - because to do so would destroy their phony “saving the planet” narrative and quest for total control over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties.
No wonder the UN-AOC-environmentalist crowd went ballistic over Moore’s film. YouTube yanked the movie from its viewing platform, and “mainstream” media, social media, search engines and information sites are now engaging in blatant censorship on climate, energy and environmental issues.
An increasingly activist, liberal media complex also wants to dictate and control what people see, hear, say and think on race relations, medicine and virtually every other political topic. From the NY Times and Washington Post, to Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia, platforms that should be forums for robust debate instead are used to dictate what is true or false, permissible or banned.
US, EU and UN green new deals are just one component of the battle for our future. Corona lockdowns should serve as a bitter taste of what could come - not as a dress rehearsal or blueprint for it.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
Naomi Seibt, the 19-year-old anti-Greta from Germany whose climate-skeptical Youtube videos have gone viral, needs your urgent financial help. Without a hearing, German officials have fined her and demanded costs on the ground that in her devastatingly effective videos she has dared to question the Party Line about what officialdom profiteers by presenting as “dangerous” manmade global warming.
Greta (Far Left) vs. Anti-Greta (Center-Right)
As a result of this arbitrary and capricious prosecution and conviction without trial, Naomi has had her earnings cut off. Please donate securely and directly to her Patreon account. May I suggest at least $10 per month? That would be a real life-saver, and would enable Naomi to continue her valuable work.
Naomi was the star of the show at last year’s climate conference held in Munich by EIKE, the European Institute for Climate and Energy. She is an internet influencer with her own popular YouTube channel - so popular, in fact, that the totalitarian censors at YouTube have shadow-banned her channel, cutting her potential income from it by nine-tenths.
James Taylor of the Heartland Institute met Naomi in Munich and invited her to speak at the Heartland Conference in in December 2019 during the U.N. Gaia-worship haj in Madrid. Her five-minute speech attracted ten times as many YouTube hits as mine. Naomi has since been showing the Heartland Institute how to increase its internet presence.
Naomi Seibt speaking at the 2019 Heartland conference in Madrid
Naomi recently received a letter from a functionary at the State Media Authority for North Rhine Westphalia, the region where she lives. The letter informed her peremptorily that, without a hearing, she has been found guilty of the alleged offense of exercising her right of free speech about the climate on YouTube in a manner that the letter described as not being “climate-friendly”.
What was such a value-laden term doing in an official letter from a public authority to its teenage victim?
In a subsequent letter, the Authority demanded a fine of about $400 and costs on top, and instructed Naomi that she must not mention the Heartland Institute in her videos. The insubstantial ground for this attempt at silencing Naomi was that such mentions constituted unlawful product placement under a recently-enacted law of the North-Rhine Westphalia region. he insubstantial ground for this attempt at silencing Naomi was that such mentions constituted unlawful product placement under a recently-enacted law of the North-Rhine Westphalia region.
However the letter makes it clear that a video is held to contravene the new law if it does two things at the same time: it advocates any policy position unacceptable to the Gau (such as opposition to Germany’s crippling Energiewende) and, in the same video, to mention a named product or entity associated with that position (such as the Heartland Institute).
The Authority listed three videos by Naomi that it considered unlawful. In fact, the list demonstrates that the charges against her are false. The Authority trumped them up, inferentially at the behest of “climate-friendly” activists.
In the first of the three specific videos of which the Authority complains, Naomi made plain her opposition the Party Line, but did not break the law because she did not mention the Heartland Institute. At the time she made that video she had not even heard of it.
In the second video Naomi announced to her followers that she was collaborating with Heartland, but did not break the law because in that video she did not advocate any policy position, whether on climate or anything else.
In the third video, Naomi again expressed opposition to the official position on climate, but did not break the law because she did not mention Heartland.
On the facts, not one of these three videos offended against the law as the correspondence from the Authority chartacterises it. The prosecution had no rational basis in fact or in law.
This is yet another instance of a traditional totalitarian tactic: to enmesh all who have publicly and effectively challenged the Party Line on climate in complex and costly legal wrangles, however ill founded, in the hope of muzzling them and cowing everyone else into silence.
Just ask Professor Peter Ridd or Dr Susan Crockford or Dr Tim Ball or Mark Steyn or countless others thus harried and bullied by the lavishly-funded watermelons.
The process is the punishment
Naomi has engaged a lawyer pro bono. She has splendidly demanded that the Authority produce its entire file on this matter, including the identities of those who complained to the Authority about her. She has also demanded copies of all correspondence or conversations between the Authority and such questionable third parties as these.
The Authority has responded by sending a file that has been obviously, in-your-face redacted. It is manifestly reluctant to admit its unsavory links with whatever totalitarian groups had asked its fellow true-believers there to silence Naomi.
The Authority’s notice of prosecution culpably fails either to spell out or in any material respect to comply with Naomi’s right to a fair trial as laid down in the European Human Rights Convention, to which Germany is a signatory.
Naomi would be well within her rights to counterclaim against the Authority for damages for abuse of its power, for contravention of the Convention (which grants her the right to a remedy) and for causing her distress, alarm and offense without the slightest legitimate or reasonable justification.
The Authority’s motto is “Committed to freedom of expression”. Try to keep a straight face.
Bizarrely, the Authority’s motto is “Der Meinungsfreiheit verpflichtet”, i.e., “Committed to Freedom of Expression”. Yeah, right. I have seldom come across so striking an example of Orwellian Newspeak. To Orwell’s “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” we can now add “Silence is Free Speech”.
Fifty years ago, I helped organize Earth Day #1 programs on my college campus, calling attention to serious pollution problems that afflicted much of the USA. Over the ensuing decades, laws, regulations, and changed attitudes, practices and technologies reduced most of that pollution, often dramatically.
I didn’t buy into the 1970 end-is-nigh, doom-and-gloom, billions-will-die hysteria that Ron Stein and Ron Bailey summarize, including the manmade global cooling crisis. I don’t buy it today, either -certainly not this year’s Earth Day focus on the alleged manmade global warming crisis, also blamed on emissions of carbon dioxide, the same gas that humans and animals exhale, and plants use to grow. We’re told the crisis is unprecedented, and poses existential threats to humanity and planet. What nonsense.
But what I find fascinating in all this is the steadfast, often nasty determination of scientists, politicians and interest groups promoting alarmist themes - and profiting immensely from them - to reject and deny any science, history and evidence that undermines their claim that nothing like this ever happened before.
The “highest ever” temperatures are a mere few tenths or even hundredths of a degree above previous records set many decades ago. The United States recently enjoyed a record 12-year respite from Category 3-5 hurricanes, ended finally by Harvey and Irma in 2017. Violent tornadoes were far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that, and the complete absence of violent twisters in 2018 was unprecedented in US history. Modern day floods and droughtswere certainly no worse than past floods or the multi-decade droughts that devastated Anasazi, Mayan and other civilizations.
However, alarmists insist, Earth’s climate and weather were stable and unchanging until humans began using coal, oil and natural gas. We must eradicate fossil fuels now, they say, regardless of what biofuel, battery, wind and solar replacements(and mining for raw materials to manufacture them) might have on wildlife, scenery, environmental values or human rights. Their disconnect from reality is astounding.
Equally fascinating is the notion that melting glaciers are something new. It amounts to asserting that everything was just peachy until American, European and Greenland glaciers started melting a few decades ago, threatening us with catastrophic sea level rise. It amounts to claiming the glacial epochs never happened; their mile-high ice sheets never blanketed a third of the Northern Hemisphere, multiple times, with warm periods in between; and seas haven’t risen some 400 feet since the Pleistocene ice age, leaving the entrance to Cosquer Cave and its Paleolithic paintings 115 feet beneath the Mediterranean.
It amounts to claiming the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods never happened, and weren’t followed by the Little Ice Age, when priests performed exorcisms, asking God to keep glaciers from inundating villages in the Alps of Europe. It’s as though we couldn’t possibly be finding what we are finding today.
In the latest example, government and university researchers recently found numerous Viking-era artifacts along a Norwegian mountain pass that had been heavily traveled for at least 700 years, but then was buried beneath the ice and lost to history for 1,000 years. Locals used the rough 2,200-foot-long pass to travel between summer and winter lodgings, while long-distance trekkers used it as a trade route.
Within the treasure trove were tunics, mittens, horse shoes and bits, remnants of sleds used to haul food and gear over winter snow, a small shelter, and even the remains of a dog with a collar and leash. They all came to light because the glacial ice is again receding, as Earth continues its post Little Ice Age warming.
Alarmists insist the warming is due to fossil fuels, and deny that it is just part of natural climate cycles. And much more evidence of past warming and cooling periods has also come to light in recent years.
In 1991, German hikers found the incredible mummified and heavily tattooed remains of “Oetzi the Ice Man” sticking out of the ice in the Oetzal Alps near the Italian-Austrian border, at an altitude of some 10,000 feet. A partial longbow, bearskin hat and other artifacts were found nearby. He had died about 5,300 years ago from an arrow wound and had the blood of four different people on his clothes and weapons. He is further evidence of human habitation in these alpine areas during past warm periods.
Tourists and archeological teams have also discovered parts of shoes, leather clothing, fragments of a wooden bowl and numerous other items from 3000 to 4500 BC (BCE) that have emerged from the alpine ice. They are among the oldest objects ever found in the Alps. A Bronze Age pin, Roman coins and early Medieval artifacts have also been found. They show how these mountain passes and trails, impassible during cold, more glaciated periods, served as vital trade routes in periodic warmer centuries.
Norwegian ice fields show shrinkage and growth patterns similar to those of the alpine glaciers, says Norwegian glacial scientist Atle Nesje. The archaeological findings “seem to fit quite nicely with our glacier reconstructions,” he adds, which helps us understand past, present and future climate changes.
Years of research by Swiss and other scientists have produced similar findings -sometimes human artifacts, but also plant and animal remains, in areas of newly melted ice. In one location in the Swiss Alps, University of Berne geology professor Christian Schluechter found pieces of wood 12-24 inches thick and the remains of a moor. Melting waters had flushed them out from under the glacier. That means the ice there is hardly “perpetual,” he says. There were multiple periods of warmer weather and less ice.
In fact, carbon-14 dating shows ten “clearly definable time windows” over the last 10,000 years - periods when glaciers were limited to regions up to 1,000 feet higher in the Alps than today. This means that, for multiple long streches of time, “the Alps were greener than they are today”, Schluechter concludes.
Inca children sacrificed 500 years ago in Argentina’s Andes have also emerged from melting glaciers.
Off the Florida coast, the Mel and Deo Fisher archeological diving team didn’t just find the famous Spanish galleon Nuestra Seņora de Atocha, which sank during a ferocious 1622 hurricane, or only the British slave ship Henrietta Marie, which went down during a 1700 hurricane, after leaving 190 Africans in Jamaica to be sold as slaves. They also found charred tree branches and pine cones from a forest fire 8,400 years ago, when this ocean area 35 miles from Key West was still well above present day sea levels!
Even an entire forest has been discovered, protruding from the melting Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska - an area I visited several years ago. Roots, stumps and large segments of entire upright spruce or hemlock trees have already been found across several acres. They are the remains of a forest that thrived there for as long as 2,350 years, until it was buried by glacial ice around 1,000 years ago.
The chronicle of amazing discoveries yielded by melting glaciers goes on and on. Their most important lesson is that our current climate is but a snapshot in time, on a vibrant planet where climate change and extreme weather have been “real” since time began. Only a science-denying climate alarmist would refuse to recognize this. Simply put, there is nothing “unprecedented” about what we are seeing today.
This is dangerous stuff - sacrilegious, even. It pulls the rug from under demands for a post-Coronavirus Green New Deal. It must be suppressed. And frightened climate science deniers are doing their best to keep it out of “mainstream” and social media. Realists must do their best to disseminate climate facts.
Of course, it may be that these past climate changes were caused by carbon dioxide and water vapor from wheezing, snorting horses, oxen and humans - laboring at the edge of exhaustion, doing what our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and equipment do for us today. But it’s far more likely that the changes were due to a complex and still poorly understood combination of solar and other powerful natural forces.
Climate alarmists may not want to recognize or discuss these natural fluctuations and causes. But the rest of us should, and this historic evidence must be a central part of that discussion.
Improving our knowledge of what these forces are and how they work together will enable us to better predict, prepare for and adapt to future climate changes. Continuing to focus on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” as the primary or sole cause of climate changes and weather events, will ensure that we never get beyond the politically driven climate and energy battles in which we are now engaged.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power; Black death and other books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Co Chief Meteorologist at Weatherbell Analytics, LLC
I have long followed and written about volcanism and its effect on the weather. I have wondered with my colleagues whether undersea volcanism could be playing a role in ocean surface thermal patterns and through that affect our weather.
We wondered whether it played a role in the 2013-2015 warmth in the NPAC that drove two incredible NAM winters like it did in 1916/17, 1917/18, 1919/20, 1933/34, 1963/64, 1977/78, 1987/88, 1993/94, 2002/03, 2004/05 - all cold and big NE snow winters.
We know El Ninos and La Ninas affect global weather patterns (with differences depending on the strength and structure) and the AMO and PDO influence global temperatures, blocking tendencies, and the frequencies of extremes like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods/droughts, snow and ice). But as the great Jerome Namias noted, warm and cold ocean pools that are not really associated with these oscillations can affect the jet stream and weather patterns. These ocean oscillations and transient thermal anomalies are a large part of the analog methods we at apply at WeatherBell.
We wondered if the very strongly positive IOD last summer might be driven by a warm pool that blossomed in the western Indian Ocean. It favored the MJO staying in cold phases from October to early December. At the same time, we observed the NPAC turn warm resulting in early snow and cold as we mentioned above occurred in some of the wildest winters.
But then that pattern flipped as the +IOD collapsed as a 5C warm blob developed in the South Pacific east of New Zealand. The MJO readjusted to the warm phases.
We recently saw this paper that provided some support for that thinking of warm pools and their influence on the weather regimes and their relation to geothermal heat from volcanism.
Hot blobs beneath the sea surface formed by the release of geothermal heat through submarine volcanic eruptions and/or sub-aerially erupted hot volcanic materials including lava flows into the sea are an underestimated natural cause of ocean heat waves. Recent examples include the 2013-2016 North Pacific Blob and the 2018-2019 Southwest Indian Ocean Blob. The present study on the development of a blob in the South Pacific Ocean referred to as the 2019-2020 South Pacific Blob has provided evidence to account for the observed recent warming in Antarctica including a new hottest temperature record on February 6, 2020 and heat wave conditions dramatically changing Antarctica in just 9 days.
At least three volcanic eruptions (Figure 1) have been identified to contribute geothermal heat during August to December 2019 (spring and early summer in the southern hemisphere) to create the South Pacific Blob with an ocean surface temperature maximum attained on December 30, 2019 (Figure 2). Out of these, two were initially submarine volcanoes located in the territorial waters of Tonga and one was an island volcano with a crater just above sea level off the North Island coast in New Zealand waters.
Figure 1 Volcanoes contributing geothermal heat to the 2019-2020 South Pacific Blob.
In August 6-8, 2019 submarine volcano F in the Tofua Arc, Tonga located about 40 kilometers south of Fonualie Island had a major eruption. The detection of this large explosive eruption was assisted by a pumice raft greater than 136.7 km2 in area on the ocean surface captured by imagery from ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellite. In October 13-22, 2019 another submarine volcano erupted destroying Lateiki Island in the Tongan archipelago followed by the birth of a new island 100 m wide and 400 m long in October 30, 2019 which subsequently disappeared beneath the waves in mid-January 2020. Meanwhile in December 9, 2019 the White Island volcano in the Bay of Plenty erupted with a 3.7 km ash plume and hot materials was discharged into the ocean through the eruption cloud.
An examination of NOAA satellite sea surface anomalies map archives has revealed that the South Pacific Blob located about 800 kilometres east of New Zealand attained maximum temperature and largest areal extent in December 30, 2019 (Figure 2). The sea surface temperature was more than 5C above normal.
Figure 2 Sea surface temperature anomalies showing the development of the South Pacific Blob east of New Zealand on December 30, 2019. Source: NOAA
See the 2013/14 warm blob in the NPAC that led to two wild central and eastern winters.
See the west Indian Ocean warm pool that drove the +2 STD IOD late last summer.
See how that drove heavy convection in the Indian Ocean and India and kept the MJO corralled in the cold phases in the late fall.
Meanwhile the NPAC warm pool blossomed as it did in 2013 - leading to ideas about cold in NAM.
But then the IOD dipole faded and the warm blob developed east of New Zealand. The MJO moved into the warm phases with heavy precipitation shifting east, the NPAC warm blob faded and the arctic trough and ++AO took away winter.
Alaska had a top 3 cold winter after the heat of early summer 2019.
Fairbank’s average 2019/20 daytime high was -2.1F, while the daytime low -20F, average daily mean was -11F! The coldest was -43F while the warmest was 31F December 9. 33 days were at or below -30F, 5 fell at or below -40F. The winter average 4.7F below normal, the coldest (3rd) since before (1975/76) the Great Pacific Climate Shift (a shift of the so called Pacific Decadal Oscillation to positive) in the late 1970s when warmer Pacific waters favored warmth in Alaska and western North America.
See how the AO was off the scale positive as the entire arctic atmosphere top to bottom was cold February to March.
Now we see more warm pool action north and south. We will be following this carefully.
Nature is awesome… forecasting is challenging, we have to look up, and globally but are at the mercy of changes from beneath too it appears.
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