Joe D’Aleo, CCM
I had planned another topic but felt obliged to correct the misinformation in the letters by Mr. Atwood the last two weeks. He obviously spends a lot of time mining the web for information and knows more than the average person but as you know, you can find on the web, information that can support your ideas. He frequently mentions Wikipedia, which he says he trusts because it is ‘moderated’.
Wikipedia is a useful resource but should come with a disclaimer - user beware!
Many of us use Wikipedia to recall the name of an actor, a favorite movie, the name or year of a song, find out how old an actor or singer we like is. You need to be careful though about biographies, history, politics and science, because the material is open source and often not true or at least slanted.
In a story this April ”Wikipedia: where truth dies online” ,"Spiked on-line” warned that not all Wikipedia publishes can be trusted. “There are over 21 million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty...Many teachers warn their students to exercise extreme caution when using it. (Note: some teachers forbid citing Wikipedia in a paper).”
Lawrence Solomon for CBSNEWS wrote how some issues like climate have the information controlled by editors or administrators who have a clear bias.
“Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.
Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley...a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.
And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate… William Connolley rode shotgun on just about any climate related article on that website.”
As of a year ago Mr. Connolley had edited 5,428 Wikipedia articles, almost all on climate and complaints about his zealotry ultimately earned him a suspension.
There are other sites like Skeptical Science that Mr. Atwood references, but they have the same bias (here and here).
Now to address the Bruce’s other claims with facts.
The grand maximum did not occur 50 years ago but over the period from 1950 to 1990 with multiple peaks around 1958, 1980, 1990. Ilya G. Usoskin of the Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory at the University of Oulu, Finland published in Living Reviews of Solar Physics a paper examining records from two isotope proxies (Be10 and C14) and found that solar activity at the end of the 20th century was at the highest levels of the past 1200 years.
The IPCC and warmists like to use the solar brightness (the visible part of the solar spectrum) which changes only 0.1 to 0.2% during the 11 year solar cycle to try and discount the solar climate connection, but they ignore other solar variables which greatly amplify the small change in the visible light like ultraviolet (which changes 6-8%), geomagnetic and the effect of the solar wind on cloud enhancing cosmic rays. You have to consider the total solar effect.
UK Professor Lockwood in 2013 found the measurement of the solar wind and record low magnetic fields during the long and record low minimum 2007 to 2009 provided some important clues for understanding the solar dynamo and explaining both the Dalton minimum near 1800 and the deeper Maunder Minimum (1640-1700). Lockwood, the Russian Pulkovo Observatory, NASA’s Hathaway and many, many other solar scientists predict a turn to much colder as we dive deeper into the upcoming next Grand Solar Minimum. The cooling winters after 1995 (2.26F for the last 20 years for the US) reflect the initial decline that began after the final 1990 peak (there is a lag of 5-8 years).
A 2014 paper by Chinese scientists (Zhao etal) reported the impact of carbon dioxide on climate change may have been overstated with the total solar activity giving a better explanation of changes in the Earth’s temperature. Indeed, the greenhouse models are all failing miserably. The IPCC admitted to low understanding of water vapor, clouds, solar and ocean cycles, all far more important than CO2, so that is no surprise.
The greenhouse theory is falsified by the facts warming is not global, that the so called atmospheric tropical hot spot, the signature feature of the heat trapping theory was absent and that the greenhouse models have failed.
Yes at the surface, there was model predicted warming in higher latitudes, but that has been observed only in the Northern Hemisphere (and ended 17 years ago - see last link) and the arctic (which is also cyclical.
Satellites, weather balloons and ocean buoys have all shown there has been no warming in the tropics from the high atmosphere all the way down 300 meters int the tropical oceans.
Finally the health study Bruce mentioned was one the EPA found impossible to defend in congress. Health claims do not relate to CO2 but to soot, which is why they no longer talk CO2 but ‘carbon pollution’. With every breathe, we exhale 100 times the CO2 than the air contains so it obviously doesn’t cause premature deaths or children’s asthma.
Soot is a problem in China but no longer in the US. Small particulates have declined 50% the last 15 years here and are below the EPA standard.
Real data suggests they are not a health hazard. See this story debunking the role particulates had even when they were more prevalent. The famous pollution episodes in Donora, PA in 1948 occurred due to trapping of other chemical pollutants and in London in 1952 from sulfuric acid mist from burning of high sulfur coal in a pea-soup inversion fog.
I had lunch with Dr. John Dale Dunn, an emergency physician with experience in epidemiology at Fort Hood and saw his presentation at the recent ICCC9 Heartland Institute conference where over 600 real scientists from over 14 countries convened to report on the real truth about climate change.
John and I agreed the EPA health risk claims are totally bogus and what is ignored is the far more serious threat due from the cold where countries (like the UK) abandoned coal and fossil fuel to chase the environmental dream of unreliable wind and solar and where prices rose so much as to make energy unaffordable for those on fixed incomes and the poor. See the deadly results of cold homes. That is where we will be going, if we ‘buy insurance’ and allow the EPA to run amuck ‘just in case’.