2016: Hottest Year Ever!

I am not a climate scientist.  I studied history, economics, and Latin in college.  I dabbled a bit with political science and creative writing but never took a class even remotely related to climate science.  Despite all that, I hold that the "climate crisis" is a hoax.  Here are some interesting points:

1. When I was 10, the earth was heading toward an Ice Age.  As a family, we would watch 'In Search of' hosted by Spock.  I liked it because it had Spock.  This episode provided a dark glimpse of what the world might be like in a single lifetime.  If the scientists were wrong here, why are they right now?

 

2. 1816: The Year Without a Summer.  In the wake of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, so much debris was thrown into the atmosphere that the following year saw mass starvation from failing crops.  New England had severe frosts every month of summer.  Despite decades of pollution, humanity has been unable to duplicate the Year Without a Summer.

 

3. The Medieval Warm Period (950 to 1250) saw temperatures roughly equivalent to today.  The Vikings found Greenland to be habitable and transplanted their agricultural and pastoral lifestyle there for several centuries.  By 1400, the Greenland settlements were nearly gone and vanished soon thereafter because of the increasing cold.  Clearly, this warming was not anthropogenic.  Why is the current warming trend different from the Medieval Warm Period?

 

4. The Earth is currently in an ice age that began 2.6 million years ago.  An ice age is geologically defined as the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.  Because the ice sheets/glaciers have retreated for several millennia, the earth is experiencing an interglacial period.  This 10,000 year warming is not anthropogenic.  Why is the current - comparatively insignificant - warming different from that trend?

 

5. During the Mesozoic Era (252 million to 66 million years ago), the earth was 10 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today.  There were no ice caps at the poles.  This was not anthropogenic.  Was 2016 hotter than an average year in the Mesozoic?  If not, is it really the Hottest Year Ever?

 

The earth has been much warmer and much colder than today.  The climate experienced these huge swings with no input from humans.  These variations have developed over millions of years.  Though these points may provide the layman some reason to doubt the ongoing panic about climate change, that isn't a reason to call it a hoax!

 

Like all living things, government wants to grow and prosper.  Studies that 'prove' that climate change is anthropogenic provide cover for government to expand its power and reach.  Taxes on pollution, regulations to make sure cars get more miles to the gallon, laws to make washing machines more energy efficient, and so on and so forth.  There is so much that government can do, provided there is a basis for it.  Thus, scientists who find that humanity is to blame and the problem could be solved by government intervention are handsomely funded.  Scientists who conclude that it is the sun - which governments have no legislative authority to control - are not funded.  Anthropogenic warming = funding.  Natural climate cycles = no funding.  Scientists are smart people and see the pattern.

Welcome to the Apocalypse

When former Vice President Al Gore attended the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006 to premiere his propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, he declared that, unless drastic measures were taken regarding greenhouse gasses, the earth would reach a point of no return in ten years.  It has now been ten years.  The doom is now unavoidable.  The ice caps will melt shortly, the polar bears will drown, and NYC will sink into the Atlantic Ocean any second now.  Okay, just a few more seconds.  Hmm.  Well, the standard deviation of the ten year prediction must allow for leeway.

 

Obviously, the claim was just fear-mongering, an effort to convince the electorate to approve 'drastic measures' that would include more money and power to government.  The people didn't bite and now, ten years later, the scam is clearly revealed.  Of course, there will be an excuse.  Perhaps it has already been offered and I have missed it.  Gore's Frying Pan Earth notion has been replaced by Obama's more vague Climate Change.

 

This has been the modus operandi of the environmental movement since the first Earth Day in 1970.  Here is a list of some of those initial predictions.  Note that none of them came to pass.  The catastrophes scheduled for 1975 haves still not occurred even 40 years later.  Global cooling changed to global warming and now it is climate change.

 

If only the government could take more of our money and infringe further on our property rights and freedom, I'm sure the issue could be solved.

The Coming Ice Age... er... Global Warming... er... Climate Change!

In April of 1975, Newsweek published this story about The Cooling World.  Ominous signs portended likely famine because average temperatures were falling.  Dr. Murray Mitchell noted a half degree drop in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.  Columbia University's George Kunda saw a large increase in snow cover.

 

In May of 1978, In Search of, the television show hosted by Leonard Nimoy, investigated The Coming Ice Age in this episode.  Several scientists (Dr. James Hayes, Dr. Chester Langway, Dr. Gifford Miller, Dr. Stephen Schneider) were consulted.  The glaciologist argued that Baffin Island in Canada was signaling the next ice age; ice didn't melt in the summer of 1972.  A severe winter across North America in 1976-77 showed just how close we were.  Buffalo, NY had 40 days straight of snow!  Dr. Miller suggested that the current warm period likely ended 3000 years ago.  The show concludes that, in as little as one lifetime, we could see ice sheets stretching into Kansas.  It was all very dire.

 

Then, in 1987, Dr. James Hansen of NASA testified before the Senate that Global Warming was going to ruin us.  Senator Al Gore seized upon this doomsayer's testimony and soon published a book, Earth in the Balance (1992).  Later, he wrote and starred in the Oscar winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which predicted doom from fossil fuels and the earth becoming an oven.  The polar bears are doomed!

 

In a space of less than 10 years, scientists had switched from an Ice Age to a heat wave.  With ice cores dating back scores of millennia and geologic weather data that stretches back hundreds of millions of years, somehow the predictions all turned on a dime.  How could all of those scientists in the 70s have been SO wrong?  Were they fired for incompetence?  Moreover, the predictions were now based on human activity, not natural cycles.  We can stop it, but only if we give government the power and money to rescue us from our folly.

 

Climate change is a government fundraiser, kind of like a school bake sale but scarier.  Scientists who are funded by government grants offer research that says government needs more power and money.  You scratch my back...  Climate change is a convenient lie; by the time the warming would have occurred, most of us will be dead.  However, in the present, government will have increased its authority and funding.

The Coming Mini Ice Age

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3156594/Is-mini-ICE-AGE-way-Scientists-warn-sun-sleep-2020-cause-temperatures-plummet.html

So how do you feel about that 'Global Warming' now?  Gee, maybe this explains the switch to Climate Change.  I wonder how it will turn out to be our fault that the sun is going to sleep.

Interglacial Period

The current glacial age (i.e. ice age) began 2.6 million years ago when the Earth wobbled in its orbit around the sun.  Since then, the Earth has undergone glacial periods - where the ice expands from the poles - and interglacial periods - when the ice retreats back to the poles.  The current interglacial period began approximately 12 thousand years ago.  However, during that glacial period, sufficient water had been turned to ice so that the sea levels were 350 feet lower than today.  This meant that the English Channel was dry and crossable.  Siberia and Alaska were connected and allowed for cross-migration between North America and Asia.  The camel evolved in North America but migrated to Asia, where it still exists.  It died out here though its cousins - llamas and alpacas - still flourish in South America.  Of course, humans made their way to North America as well.  But the ice melted and the sea levels rose drastically.  What caused all that warming?  Not fossil fuels.

During the glacial periods, the ice has extended over much of Europe, the whole of Canada, all the Great Lakes and into the Midwest.  When there are no longer ice sheets covering the poles and Greenland, it will signal the end of the current ice age.  With that in mind, I came across the following:

http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/09/14/earth-gains-a-record-amount-of-sea-ice-in-2013-earth-has-gained-19000-manhattans-of-sea-ice-since-this-date-last-year-the-largest-increase-on-record/

Record ice growth of 19,000 Manhattan islands.  That's a lot of ice.  Hardly what you would expect during global warming.  The Earth has experience dramatic warming during the past 12,000 years, most of it long before mankind burned any fossil fuels.  Moreover, the Earth has been much warmer than it is today.  When dinosaurs roamed, the tropics extended as far north as North Dakota.  Looking at the geological record, the Earth is far more likely to go into another glacial period than to experience endless heat waves.  There is a reason that Al Gore talks of Climate Crisis rather than Global Warming now.