Those promoting CO2 as the reason for global warming are hucksters and those taken in by hucksters.
“We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s
Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space,
our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon
set a Space Age record for cold.”
The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the
Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is
onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and
Dynamics (TIMED) satellite.
SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon
dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in
the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum.
It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said
Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.
The new NASA findings are in line with studies released
by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of
which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot
activity.
Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of
the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the
Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.
If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself,
you’re right — sort of.
After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea
ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began.
Isn’t that a sure sign
of global warming?
All any of this “proves” is that we have, at
best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system.
So
when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you
that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back,
take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or
resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate.
Incredibly Complex Systems
See the problem?
Alarmists take one variable, CO2 that is
only a tiny part of extremely long cycles and make projections far into to the
future based off it.
When I was in grade school, the alarmists were worried
about global cooling.
Amusingly, I recall discussing in science class the need
to put soot on the arctic ice to melt it to stop the advance of glaciers.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered
the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.
NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming
fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article
proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have
to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme
warming.”
Geo-engineering: Ignoring the Consequences
Watts
Up With That discusses Geo-Engineering: Ignoring the Consequences.
From 1940 to almost 1980, the average global
temperature went down. Political concerns and the
alleged scientific consensus focused on global cooling. Alarmists
said it could be the end of agriculture and civilization.
Journalist Lowell
Ponte wrote in his 1976 book, The Cooling.
The problem then was – and still is now – that people are
educated in the false philosophy of uniformitarianism: the misguided belief
that conditions always were and always will be as they are now, and any natural
changes will occur over long periods of time.
Consequently, most people did not understand that the
cooling was part of the natural cycle of climate variability, or that changes
are often huge and sudden. Just 18,000 years ago we were at the peak of an
Ice Age.
Then, most of the ice melted and sea levels rose 150 meters (490
feet), because it was warmer for almost all of the last 10,000 years than it is
today.
During the cooling “danger,” geo-engineering proposals
included:
* building a dam across the Bering Straits to block cold
Arctic water, to warm the North Pacific and the middle latitudes of the
Northern Hemisphere;
* dumping black soot on the Arctic ice cap to promote
melting;
* adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere to raise
global temperatures.
“Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” as
advocated by the IPCC in its October 8 news conference, is also foolish.
Historic records show that, at about 410 parts per million (ppm), the level of
CO2 supposedly in the atmosphere now, we are near the lowest in the last 280
million years. As plants evolved over that time, the average level was 1200
ppm. That is why commercial greenhouses boost CO2 to that level to increase
plant growth and yields by a factor of four.
The IPCC has been wrong in every prediction
it’s made since 1990. It would be a grave error to use its latest
forecasts as the excuse to engage in geo-engineering experiments with the only
planet we have.
Global Warming Errs Badly
Next, please consider Extreme weather not proof of global warming, NASA on global
cooling
To understand the great confusion about global warming or
climate change, my most lucid guide has been Dr. Richard Lindzen — a former
Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT and member of the US National
Academy of Sciences — and his now famous lecture for the Global Warming Policy
Foundation last October 8.
In just a number of segments of his lecture, Dr. Lindzen
crystallized for me why the church of global warming errs so badly in its
dogma.
Global warming promoters fostered the popular public
perception of the science of climate change as quite simple.
It is that here’s
one phenomenon to be explained (“global average temperature,” or GAT, which,
says Lindzen, is a thoroughly unscientific concept). And there’s one
explanation for it: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
GAT is only one of many important phenomena to measure in
the climate system, and CO2 is only one of many factors that influence both GAT
and all the other phenomena.
CO2’s role in controlling GAT is at most perhaps 2
percent, yet climate alarmists think of it as the “control knob.”
Most people readily confuse weather
(short-term, local-scale temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind,
cloudiness, and more) with climate (long-term, large-scale of each) and think
weather phenomena are driven by climate phenomena; they aren’t.
Consequently, as Lindzen says, the currently popular
narrative concerning this system is this: The climate, a complex multifactor
system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged
temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1 to 2 percent perturbation
in the energy budget due to a single variable — carbon dioxide — among many
variables of comparable importance.
Big Chill
Did You Know the Greatest Two-Year Global Cooling Event Just Took
Place?
Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global
two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred?
From February 2016 to
February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped
0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop,
0.47°C—also during the global warming era.
All the data in this essay come
from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP).
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/).
This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global
average temperatures.
The 2016-18 Big Chill was composed of two Little Chills,
the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest
(February to June 2017).
A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring
global average temperatures below the 1980s average. February 2018 was colder
than February 1998.
If someone is tempted to argue that the reason for recent
record cooling periods is that global temperatures are getting more volatile,
it's not true.
The volatility of monthly global average temperatures since 2000
is only two-thirds what it was from 1880 to 1999.
None of this argues against global warming.
The 1950s was
the last decade cooler than the previous decade, the next five decades were all
warmer on average than the decade before.
Two year cooling cycles, even if they
set records, are statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.
My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no
media attention.
The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If
they show a new hottest year on record, that's a big story.
If they show a big
increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year,
that's a story.
If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that's
a story.
When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling
months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there's no story.
Bombarded With Garbage
Of course you did not know that unless you follow NASA,
Real Clear Markets, or Watts Up With That.
Meanwhile, everyone is constantly bombarded with total
garbage like Al Gore's claim Migrant Caravans are Victims of Global Warming.
And of course, the media is fawning all over AOC's
"New Green Deal" hype as she too is a believer the World
Will End in 12 Years if we don't address climate change.
The Guardian and the Intercept are both happy to promote
this nonsense as of course the entirety of mainstream media.
Alarm Bells
When I was in grade school we had major alarm bells over
global cooling. In high school it was population growth. Then came food
shortages followed by peak oil.
Now the crisis du jour is global warming.
It's always about something!
CO2 Derangement Symptom
Watts
Up With That accurately labels global warming hysteria as
the CO2 Derangement Syndrome.
That's an excellent synopsis of the current state of
affairs so please give it a good look.
Finally, even if you still believe man-made global
warming is a threat, please ponder the notion that governments will not do
anything sensible about it.
