Natural Climate Change Deniers Still Ranting

I agree with a frequent Liberal letter writer to our local weekly paper (The Independent Coast Observer, Gualala, CA) that rants by “deniers” on both sides have no place in the Climate Change Debate. It has obviously been warming for over the past 200 years, although not as much as in previous periods of natural climate change. A comparison of warming 1895-1945 and 1946-2013 appear almost identical, which means that current warming isn’t unprecedented even in the past century, let alone when compared to four warmer periods during the past 10,000 years. (link)

Natural climate change deniers such as Al Gore have made a mockery of the word “unprecedented” by applying it to our current period of modest warming. “Unprecedented” loses significance when modified, i.e,  “since Gore’s birth (1948).”

Gore recently said that “the hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6.” But they’re not; a Quaternary Science Reviews paper finds 21st century central Pacific cyclone activity is at the lowest levels of the past 5,000 years, that Japan typhoons are at the lowest levels of the past 3,500 years, and that North Atlantic hurricanes were more frequent/severe than modern times during various intervals over the past 3,000 years. (link)

It’s been eight years since a major hurricane hit the US, the longest such period since 1866. Obama has had the fewest hurricanes of any president. (link)

Getting back to ranting, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Gore equated his fight against global warming to the struggles against slavery, segregation and apartheid. (link) Gore said the issue is now one of right and wrong, which eliminates any basis for a Climate Change Debate. That’s not surprising since Gore will not debate about natural climate change or defend his more-than 35 science falsehoods in An Inconvenient Truth.

Gore’s just like the natural climate change deniers in our area.

We Don't Have A Planetary Emergency - Yet

Global Warming never was a planetary emergency, and then it became natural climate change (“natural” was omitted – it’s an inconvenient truth). Then it became severe weather, except that a modicum of weather history research shows current weather not nearly as severe as previous. Through it all the word “unprecedented” has been liberally sprinkled, without adding the caveats that the warming was only unprecedented if you only look back a century, or almost a millennium at most. How moderate warming can be considered an emergency, given the greater good it provides, and the economic and societal progress burning fossil fuels provides can be considered dangerous, is ludicrous. The alternative, global cooling leading into another glacial period, can be easily demonstrated to be a magnitude greater in terms of human catastrophes than warming could ever. For the past million years, 100,000-year glacial periods have alternated with 10,000-year interglacials. It’s no accident that humanity made more progress in the 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age than in the 100,000 years that preceded it. It won’t be long (in geological terms) before Chicago is back under a mile-thick ice sheet, and San Franciscans have to travel west 26 miles to get to the cruise ship berths. Dante was wise when he made ice the inner circle of Hell. A “Slushball” Earth is a planetary emergency to truly fear.

Useful Climate Change Alarmist Idiots

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat had another nonsensical alarmist climate change article. This one was about recent Clear Lake warming (LakesWarming Up: ‘Sentinels for climate change’, August 19, 2013), which sounded significant and ominous until near the end of the article when Thomas Smythe, Lake County’s water resource engineer for 25 years, noted that Clear Lake’s temperature declined from 1970 to 1990, but by 2008 had rebounded to the 1970 level.

Interestingly, Clear Lake cooled for twenty years during a period Al Gore called unprecedented warming, and warmed during the past 23 years, the last sixteen of which haven’t warmed.  

The article also mentioned that Clear Lake warmed at a rate of 0.09 degrees per year from 1992 to 2008, compared to 0.23 degrees per year for Lake Tahoe at the same time. More nonsense, since Lake Tahoe has an average depth of 1,000 feet, and Clear Lake averages 27 feet deep.  Being charitable, the reporter probably got the temperatures reversed. However, Al Gore was at Lake Tahoe on Monday this week, and he said it was getting clearer and never mentioned its warming. Since the warming rate reported in the article is 23 degrees per century, if that were truly the case Big Al would have been all over it.

The article also mentioned the usual panic items: rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, decreasing snowmelt runoff, and increasing wildfires.  However, sea levels have been rising at a rate of seven inches per century since 1800 (link); glaciers shrank much faster in the 1800s than in the past century (link); Northern Hemisphere snow cover was the highest in 2013 since records began in 1966 (link); and wildfires are at a record low (link).

The Press Democrat article was typical of modern science “journalism” – useful idiots in service to alarmist agendas.

Challenge to Debate Natural Climate Change Deniers

I still haven’t watched Chasing Ice; I’ve had too much good science to read and ponder this past week to waste time on an entertainment that purports to be science by recording a short time period of glacier retreat. Where were these climate change “documentary” film makers when the Muir Glacier, Glacier Bay, Alaska, retreated 60 miles in the 1800’s and only 6 miles since?

The most interesting study I read blows away the extremely limited and misinterpreted proxies that underpinned Al Gore’s “Hockey Stick” in An Inconvenient Truth.  As we all remember from my previous letters, the Hockey Stick did not display the well-documented higher warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850-1350AD) or the cold of the Little Ice Age (1350-1850AD), and without disclosure the Hockey Stick eliminated tree ring samples and replaced them with instrumental records when recent tree rings showed cooling when alarmist scientists wanted warming.

However, torturing tree rings to make them divulge desired outcomes can’t stand against natural evidence. Nature provides us unequivocal records of past greater warming: coral mounts rising high above current sea level. Simply, coral does not grow above water, so high-and-dry coral skeletons prove Earth has had warmer periods.  One such previous warm period was the Eemian, only 125,000 years ago; coral mounts formed during the Eemian show sea level was almost 30 feet higher, indicating temperature about 10°F above the present. Other coral mounts show sea levels up to 10 feet higher during three recent warming periods – the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Roman, and Medieval, during the past 8,000 years.

Since atmospheric CO2 never rose above 280ppm during these earlier warm periods, it would give me great pleasure to debate a natural climate change denier and begin by asking: Did CO2 cause these warmer periods?

How?

"Chasing Ice" Challenge

I agreed I would watch the “documentary” Chasing Ice if a friend would watch Murry Salby’s Relationship between Greenhouse Gases and Global Temperature. I haven’t watched Chasing Ice yet, but the differences between the two are obvious: Chasing Ice is visual entertainment, Salby is science. I read numerous  Chasing Ice reviews; none were by scientists, none noted that natural climate change has been in a warming phase for over 200 years, and none were aware that glacier retreat was much faster and more extensive in the 1800’s. It’s hard to explain natural climate change to a modern audience because there was no dramatic film available from the 1800’s.

However, there is another, enormous problem in being a skeptic and opposing the natural climate change deniers: saying that something is normal, and that nothing needs doing to keep it that way, does not tap into the human urge to do something to save the world. Imagine Paul Revere’s ride through the night shouting: “The British aren’t coming!” if the British decided to give up and go home.

No one gets excited when science demonstrates climate change is natural, always has been, and that humanity doesn’t have to turn to Stone Age economics to save anything. In fact, if we did nothing except encourage the abundant and wise use of energy resources and free trade, the resulting increase in global prosperity could cure the problems of overpopulation, hunger, disease, violence, and reality TV shows.

Well, four out of five isn’t bad.

Prosperity has already worked wonders in developed nations, perhaps even too well. The populations of European nations and Japan are already shrinking, and ours would be too if our freedoms and opportunities weren’t a magnet to the world.

Time to watch the simplistic Chasing Ice for some good laughs.