The
Galileo of Global Warming
It's
not PC to blame Mother Nature
In a scientific establishment 50-percent
financed by the government few can resist the cult of human-caused global
warming.
Keigwin, though, is the more intriguing
case.
A 54-year-old oceanographer at Woods Hole
Observatory near the Massachusetts Cape, he found a way to concoct a 3,000-year
record of the temperatures of the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda through analyzing
thermally dependent oxygen isotopes in fossils on the ocean floor.
He discovered that temperatures a thousand
years ago, during the so-called medieval climate optimum, were two degrees
Celsius warmer than today's and that the average temperature over the last
three millennia was slightly warmer than today's.
Roughly confirming this result are historical
records -- the verdancy of Greenland at the time of the Vikings, the little
ice age of the mid-1700s, a long series of temperature readings collected
in Britain over the last 300 years documenting a slow recovery from the
ice age, reports of medieval temperatures from a variety of sources, and
records of tree rings and ice cores.
These previous findings, echoed by Keigwin's,
are devastating to the theory of human-caused global warming.
If the Earth was significantly warmer
a thousand years ago, if we have been on a re-warming trend for three centuries,
if, as other even more voluminous evidence suggests, the Earth has repeatedly
seen mini-cycles of warming and cooling of about 1,500 years duration,
then any upward drift in temperatures we may be seeing now -- included
scattered anecdotes of thinning arctic ice -- is likely to be the result
of such cycles.
Thus the case for human-caused global warming
can no longer rest on the mere fact of contemporary warming.
To justify drastic action like the Kyoto
treaty requiring a reduction in U.S. energy consumption of some 30 percent,
unfeasible without destroying the U.S. economy, the human-caused global
warming advocates would have to demonstrate a persuasive mechanism of human
causation. This they show no sign of being able to do.
Grasping the point, scientists at Exxon
Mobil recently used the Keigwin data in a Wall Street Journal ad
and the PC bees hit the fan.
By all reasonable standards, Keigwin is
a hero.
Not only did he invent an ingenious way
to compile an early temperature record, but he made a giant contribution
to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy clamp on the
world economy.
But soon enough his government-financed
colleagues began to exert pressure.
Was he a tool of the oil companies?
Lordy no, he wrote, in an indignant letter
to Exxon Mobil, denying that his findings had anything much to do with
the global warming issue.
As the Wall Street Journal reported,
"Dr. Keigwin warns that the results are not representative of the
Earth as a whole. He says that the importance of his research isn't in
the data per se, but rather that marine geologists can undertake such a
study at all.... He wants to put the issue behind him."
Hey, he's got a new government grant to
find out "what's causing a substantial warming in the Atlantic Ocean off
Nova Scotia."
He has not reached any conclusion -- but
according to the Journal, "he gives a nod to global warming concerns,
saying 'I'd take a guess.'"
Scores of scientists have been pressured
to embrace the cult pressures that befall any critic of the cult of human-caused
global warming.
In a scientific establishment 50 percent
financed by government, few can resist.
An eminent scientist who was once the
leading critic of global warming had to stop writing on the subject in
order to continue his research.
The source of the pressure that ended
his publications was then-Senator Al Gore.
Later this scientist coauthored a key
paper with Arthur Robinson -- organizer of a petition against Kyoto signed
by 17,000 scientists -- but had to remove his name under pressure from
Washington.
Keigwin's denials of his own significance
are all pathetically misleading.
The temperature pattern he found in the
Sargasso Sea is indeed a global phenomenon.
Sallie Baliunas and Willi Soon of Harvard
have uncovered a new oxygen isotope study that extends this temperature
record another 3,000 years based on six millennia of evidence from peat
bogs in northeastern China.
The peat bog records both confirm Keigwin
and demonstrate an even warmer period that lasted for 2,000 years.
During this era, beginning some 4,000
years ago and running until the birth of Christ, temperatures averaged
between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius higher than they do today.
Summing up the case is an article published
earlier this year by Wallace Broecker in the prestigious pages of Science
entitled "Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?" His answer is a resounding
yes.
As Craig and Keith Idso report in a March
7 editorial on their Webpage,
Broecker recounts substantial evidence for a series of climatic warmings
spaced at roughly 1,500-year intervals. Broecker explains the science of
reconstructing the histories of surface air temperatures by examining temperature
data from "boreholes." From some 6,000 boreholes on all continents, this
evidence confirms that the Earth was significantly warmer a thousand years
ago and two degrees Celsius warmer in Greenland. This data, Robinson warns,
is less detailed and authoritative than the evidence from the Sargasso
Sea and from the Chinese peat bogs.
But together with the independent historical
record, the collective evidence is irrefutable. Thousands of years of data
demonstrate that in the face of a few hundred parts per million increase
in CO2, temperatures today, if anything, are colder than usual.
Temperatures in Antarctica, for example,
have been falling for the last 20 years.
The global satellite record of atmospheric
temperature, confirmed by weather balloons, shows little change one way
or another for the last three decades.
Terrestrial temperature stations, on average,
show more warming over the past century, but many are located in areas
that were rural when the stations were established and are densely urban
today, a change which causes local warming.
The dominance of natural cycles globally
is not surprising since, as Baliunas and Soon report, the impact of changes
in sun energy output are some 70,000 times more significant than all human
activity put together.
Overall, the situation is simple.
Politicized scientists with government
grants and dubious computer temperature models persuaded the world's politicians
to make pompous fools of themselves in Kyoto. Socialist politicians were
happy to join an absurd movement to impose government regulations over
the world energy supply and thus over the world economy. The scientific
claims and computer models have now blown up in their faces. But rather
than admit error they persist in their fear-mongering. When this happened
with DDT, hundreds of millions of people died of malaria. They continue
to die. How many people would die as a result of an energy clamp on global
capitalism?
From May, 2001 American
Spectator article. |
here is an example of the thinking this pipe dream creates:
>But rather than admit error they persist in their fear-mongering. When this happened with DDT, hundreds of millions of people died of malaria. They continue to die. How many people would die as a result of an energy clamp on global capitalism?<
so in their perfect world, there is nothing to blame except fear mongering scientists. the scientists are responsible for the deaths of "hundreds of millions of people" because they were so arrogant as to question the safety of DDT. in their perfect world, we can all poor DDT over ourselves and add it to water as a special flavor. these fear mongering scientists may also be responsible for the collpase of capitalism, and the deaths of hundreds of millions more people due to starvation because they could not eat at mcdonalds.
in the american spectator's perfect world, there is only one source of energy: oil and/or coal. there is no sun, no wind, no fuel cells. there are no bright young people at m.i.t. trying to figure out how to make fuel cells or solar energy cost effective. no, there is none of that. there is only oil, coal, and more oil. forever. and if the "fear mongering scientists" don't stop, the scientists may put an "energy clamp" on global capitalism. you see, in their perfect world capitalism is perfect, and oil is worth american lives in the middle east. in their perfect world, there is no alternative.
before every ice age known on planet earth, temperatures spiked upwards. this caused more precipitation. more thunderstorms, more flooding, more hurricanes, and most impotantly, more snow fall at the poles. as more and more snow fell, more and more sunlight was reflected off the white snow back up into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to fall, and keep on falling. and soon the glaciers start to march farther and farther south. so anyway, the ol' earth is due for another ice age. and perhaps we'll see cities like new york flooded by the sea, and then frozen over? like in spielberg's a.i.?
so, is man causing the temperatures to spike upwards, and then the earth to over react and go the other way? who knows. but if man wasn't the cause, does that mean we can all drive s.u.v.'s with impugnity, can send young americans to their deaths in the middle east for oil, can do oil business with saddam one minute and curse him the next? is that "alright" as the american spectator thinks it is...
One relevant link you left off is the new EPA report which concludes, "While the changes observed over the last several decades are likely due mostly to human activities, we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability."
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/publications/car/index.html
> included scattered anecdotes of thinning arctic ice
To refer to this heavily reported phenomenon of the cracking of the arctic ice-shelf as a scattered anecdote is disingenuous.
http://peaceconspiracy.org/news/stories/article-2002020.html
>To justify drastic action like the Kyoto treaty requiring a reduction in U.S. energy consumption of some 30 percent, unfeasible without destroying the U.S. economy
If global warmning were the only concern prompting environmentalists to call for energy consumption reduction, this comment would be fair here. However, pollution, limited fossil fuel reserves, health problems from ground level ozone increases, human rights abuses resulting from militarism over oil and many other concerns are factors.
>In a scientific establishment 50 percent financed by government, few can resist.
Don't forget that just fifteen years ago, the White House scoffed at ideas of global warming. Even under Clinton / Gore, we did not sign on to Kyoto. Clearly the government would like to have us thinking global warming is not a concern. Your own points about how reducing energy consumption could hurt our oil-addicted economy should indicate the government's bias lies in the other direction.
>When this happened with DDT, hundreds of millions of people died of malaria.
This is a very confusing statistic. The DDT phase-out occured in the mid 1970s. The World Health Org. estimates that 1.5 - 2.7 million die each year from malaria, making the total number of deaths since any DDT phase-out of malaria 40 - 70 million worldwide. Whatever percentage of that you attribute to DDT phase-out your statistic would be off by at least a factor of ten.