The Simple Truth About Global Warming

by Paul Oman 6/07

BS geology/oceanography; MS physical science/geology; MBA

I can get really worked up over the phony panic and one sided lies that are built around 'Global Warming.' The myth about it being man-made gets under my skin and the suggested solutions are all about somebody making money, grabbing the spotlight or some other self-serving agenda.

I had been working for weeks on countering the Global Warming panic point by point with a listing of Googles searches that set the record straight without directing anyone toward any one particular web site which would present the site's natural bias for or against the particular point. For example Google Mars Ice Caps and you'll find that they are melting. Mars, it seems, is also suffering from a rapid Global Warming. In 1974 Time Magazine wrote about the coming Ice Age predicted by scientists and Newsweek picked up the story in 1975.

But while shredding the Global Warming scare on a point by point rebuttal was mentally stimulating, it keep growing and growing in length. I have therefore decided to go in the other direction, short and sweet. Explain the truth in a few hundred words that anyone can read and perhaps comprehend the logic. Here goes!

The planet is always warming up or cooling off. We have had Ice Ages that last for thousands of years and mini ice ages and mini warm spells that last for a few hundred years (recall Washington famous Crossing of the Delaware on Christmas Eve. He barely made it across due to ice. That river hasn't 'iced up' like that in December in I don't know how many years). So we are on the warming side of the last major Ice Age, the warming side of a mini ice age and, more importantly, in a 35-40 year cycle of warming.

You don't hear much about the 35 year cycle of global warming and cooling, but at least in modern times, it is real and it is the key to understanding this current Global Warming scare.

From about 1900 to about 1940 earth was warming up rapidly (experts say the 1920s warmed at a rate faster than it did during the 1990s). The best public memory of this warming spell was known as the Great Dust Bowl (late 1930s), which literally turned farms into deserts. It was the peak or turning point of this warming cycle. John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath based upon this warming trend. It changed America.

From about 1940 to perhaps 1978 there was a cooling cycle (even as auto and factory emissions bloomed). After a few decades of cooling the 'experts' become concerned and the Time and Newsweek articles about the 'next ice age' mentioned above appeared. That was also about the time the next cycle, a warming cycle, began. Since to late 1970s or perhaps 1980 the climate has been getting warmer. That is about 35 years of warming. Showing the changing conditions in an ice field or animal species moving North since the 1980s or 1980s proves nothing except that is was probably cooler back then. You would expect it to be cooler 10 or 15 years into a warming cycle than 30 or 40 years into the same cycle.

Just as in the last two cycles, at about the time that they peak, the headlines appear. Yes, time for a Global Warming panic. The planet has been warming for over 30 years. This probably means that we are about due for the next cycle of Global cooling. In fact, scientists that the media will not quote do think that we have either already started the cooling cycle or that we will within the next few years. One of those in a name you will probably recognize, Bill Gray from the University of Colorado and famous for his Hurricane forecast predictions. Many of the others who think this way are weather scientists in Russia. Russian scientists are darn good. They put the first man in space, kept up an arms war against the USA for decades. More importantly, they work outside the sphere of special interests that promote the current Global Warming scare (Google Global Cooling Russia).

I can accept the fact that people don't understand the heating and cooling cycles, but this bit about humans causing global warming or making it worse is an outrage. Notice it is all about greenhouse gases, i.e. carbon dioxide from our cars, factories, airplanes and wasteful lifestyle that are reported to be the cause of global warming and will soon 'ruin the planet'. This is were clever entrepreneurs (like Al Gore) make lots and lots of money. Take Carbon Credits - someone sells you a voucher to offset your production of carbon dioxide. Give me a break, what a scam! Man is causing global warming, give me a grant and a TV show to talk about it. Yes, it is all about money and how to exploit natural cycles for personal gain and political correctness. Alternative fuel incentives and research funds prop up non-economical technologies and keep such companies in business and their workers in jobs.

Lets close by taking a closer look at that evil villain, carbon dioxide that is reported to be causing all our problems. It is claimed that the documented increase in carbon dioxide is the result of man made activities and at the least a major contributor to Global Warming. No one has probably every told you that carbon dioxide makes up less than 1/3 of 1 percent of the atmosphere. Even a super huge increase in carbon dioxide probably wouldn't even push it up to one half of a percent. If you were doing a school paper on the atmosphere you might very well skip mentioning any gas that wasn't even close to being one half of one percent of the air. So, using your common sense (yes, we all could be wrong here) could a change in something from about a quarter of a percent to about one third of a percent possibly alter our climate so dramatically? Just doesn't seem likely to me.

And other point. Most of the carbon dioxide on our planet is stored in the oceans. As water warms it is less able to hold dissolved gasses. So it seems likely to me that Global Warming is causing the release of carbon dioxide (from the oceans) and not the other way around. The affect of carbon dioxide, whether from the oceans or the activities of man, don't seem to be a much of a factor in climate change, but it seems to be the only one that can be manipulated for personal gain.

CONCLUSION: We are about 35 years into a cycle of global warming that lasts about 35 or 40 years and which seems to operate and be essentially independent of anything mankind is doing. Manipulation of the facts, half truths, and media panic hype for personal gain are the sad realities of life in the 21st century.

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GOOGLE SEARCHES FOR FUN AND TRUTH: Atmospheric Composition, bill gray global warming, wikipedia greenhouse gases, trees methane greenhouse, global warming benefits, urban heat sink, global mean temperature graph 1880, Newsweek April 28, 1975, Time June 24, 1974 another ice age, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, planetary wobble global warming chandler, Antarctic climate model, solar radiation, cosmic ray flux, Mars ice caps, global cooling russia, ocean cooling, global warming volcanic co2, smog protect global warming, methane trees, cattle greenhouse gases, alarmists global warming fear, company offset global warming, consensus global warming scientists myth, global warming meteorologists, United Nations Global Warming risks, Al Gore zinc mine, Al Gore Tobacco farm, Al Gore energy consumption, Gore carbon offset con.

Michael Fumento: On global warming, NASA has been cooking the books

By MICHAEL FUMENTO

Monday, Aug. 20, 2007

IN RETROSPECT, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking U.S. temperatures. So perhaps it shouldn't have come as a big surprise when it was revealed that NASA committed a bit of an oopsie regarding data constantly used by the mainstream media and other global warming proponents.

If you follow the global warming debate, you "know" that nine of the 10 warmest years recorded in the U.S. lower 48 since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the very hottest being 1998.

But whaddya know? Those figures are wrong. Data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) now show the hottest year since 1880 was 1934. Nineteen-ninety-eight dropped to second, while the third hottest year was way back in 1921. Indeed, four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, while only three were in the past decade.

The real 15 hottest years are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before the chief "greenhouse gas," atmospheric carbon dioxide, began its sharp rise; seven occurred afterwards.

Rush Limbaugh was incorrect in saying the new figures are "just more evidence" that "this whole global warming thing is a scientific hoax." Conversely, global warming hotheads are also wrong in insisting the revelation belongs in a game of Trivial Pursuit.

The GISS, which is directed by global warming guru James Hansen, is saying likewise. They're wrong, in part because of the importance of the data and in part because of what might be labeled a cover-up.

In pooh-poohing the revision, the GISS ignores the tremendous emotional impact it's had in practically claiming each year is hotter than the one before. Instead it observes (correctly) since the U.S. accounts for merely 2 percent of global land surface, a relatively small adjustment in its figures doesn't meaningfully impact the global picture.

But, notes Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre, who exposed the false figures, "The Hansen error . . . has a significant impact on the GISS estimate of U.S. temperature history . . ." Is this important because we're a major world power or that we produce the best fried chicken? No, it's important because we have a far more sophisticated system of temperature monitoring than countries with far larger land masses. Hence, data from each of these nations affect the global model more than the American data.

"Many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas," observes McIntyre. This can produce hotter temperatures, yet some of the major trackers of the data from these countries, including the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, make no attempt to adjust for monitor placement errors. In any event, for some reason "the U.S. history has a rather minimal (warming) trend if any since the 1930s, while the ROW (rest of the world) has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s."

Thus if the U.S. model, by far the most accurate one, became the model, it would be a gut punch to those claiming we must take drastic, horrifically expense measures right now to ameliorate warming.

Therefore, for the GISS to say this "only" affects the U.S. data is rather like a used car salesman insisting, "This automobile defect is trivial; it only affects steering and braking."

Then there's the issue of how the revised data came about and came to light.

McIntyre discovered an error in GISS records for the years 2000 through 2006. In simplest terms, they hadn't been adjusted to compensate for the location or time of day where the data was gathered. Nobody at GISS ever correlated those newer figures with the older ones until McIntyre did, even though later Hansen admitted it was "easy to fix." McIntyre published the data on his own Web site and got the agency to admit it was wrong and post new figures.

Yet the GISS did absolutely nothing to alert scientists or the public to the new figures. This though it has published five global warming press releases so far this year, each one alarming. It took the blogosphere and radio talk show hosts to publicize the new figures even as the mainstream media initially ignored them.

Ultimately the greatest importance of all of this is that it strongly appears to substantiate the intuitive belief that, with scientist-politician Hansen at the helm the GISS, whose data are far more important to modeling global temperatures -- and hence global warming policy -- than it lets on, is not a neutral collector and disseminator of statistics but rather a politicized mouthpiece.

Michael Fumento is a Washington-based science, health, and military writer, online at www.michaelfumento.com.

Sept 20/2007 update

I am very dissapointed with the icon National Geographic. They are pro global warming all the way. Both the cable network and the magazine don't give you a 'fair and balanced' case on global warming. They start all their graphs, etc. in 1976 or so to maximize the change in temperature since then. They don't tell you, or show you, that if they started the graphs in 1936 there would be no net change in temperature of those 70 years. That's right, all those post WWII years of 'massive' CO2 emmisions and we're at pre WWII temperatures.

They imply, like nearly all of the global warming extremists, that the rate of 1976-present global warming will continue on and on until we're baked off the planet. No suggestion of warming and cooling cycles, that we might be at or near the end of the current period of warming, that the warming oceans are probably releasing most of the CO2 and that these CO2 emissions might well be a result of global warming, not a cause.

No, National Geographic is not a balanced source of information. They push the extreme, emtional picture instead. The good news is that I've found the extreme worst case scenario never happens. It is never gets as bad as one can imagine!

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