Monday, January 31, 2011

New Study Affirms Natural Climate Change


It has been much ado about nothing for so long and now the chickens are coming home to roost. All that we've heard, and read, about man-made global warming is turning out to be a farce. (When was the last time we heard anything from Al Gore about the issue?) It appears that study after study is now proving that what the earth is experiencing is just cyclical warming that's been happening for centuries, if not millenia. This is just one more example of how politics has been inserted into science.




BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO2 emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources:

1 )The Hindustan Times January 21, 2011.
2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

.DENNIS T. AVERY, an environmental economist, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Monday, January 3, 2011

Global warming skeptic flattens Big Green's arrogant Oberstar

They say “pride goeth before the fall” and that’s exactly what has happened to many pretentious Democrats this past election season. They now know what it’s like to be without job. And, those who continue to push global warming (which has been proven to be based on false data) find themselves in that many-million strong unemployment line. They felt above the everyday, average American who not only feels global warming is becoming a joke, but that the support of it costs millions of jobs. In this article below, you’ll see one fine example of one congressional hopeful who did all the right things by supporting his district’s energy-based constituency.




By Ron Arnold, Executive VP of Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise; reprinted from the Washington Examiner

Political novice Chip Cravaack came out of nowhere and beat one of the most powerful Democrats in the congressional Big Green machine: Minnesota’s longest-serving, 18-term Rep. Jim Oberstar, chairman of an important committee and an influential global warming believer.

Cravaack, 50, won the state’s vast 8th Congressional District — the first Republican to serve there since 1947—by a slim 4,400 votes. It was the year of the Tea Party, Cravaack saw a chink in Oberstar’s armor, and the newcomer’s every-vote-counts campaign worked the district’s 17 counties hard, trumping Oberstar’s 100 percent rating by the League of Conservation Voters.

A Naval Academy graduate (with a master’s degree in education), decorated naval and retired airline pilot, Cravaack sincerely thought he could beat Oberstar, but nobody else did except his wife, Traci. She said she would take care of things at home—they have two sons—so he hit the road. He lives in Lindstrom, in the district’s Republican-leaning south, not far from Minneapolis, but the Democrat vote was concentrated nearly 200 miles north in the Iron Range. Many union miners and steelworkers there felt they couldn’t trust Oberstar because his defiant 2009 vote for the cap-and-trade bill was a vote to kill the mining industry.

That vote hurt Oberstar more than his vote for Obamacare, something Cravaack didn’t see at first — he decided to run because Oberstar snubbed a meeting about health care with local voters. But in September, when Cravaack went to the Minorca Mining facility in a fight for endorsement, he lost to Oberstar by a shockingly close 28-25, and a TV poll showed the incumbent ahead by only one point, 47-46.

Cravaack courted the Iron Range, promoting new mines like the multi-mineral PolyMet mine and others to supplement the huge iron industry. Don Parmeter — a native of northern Minnesota, 35-year veteran of environmental politics, and co-chairman of the National Water & Conservation Alliance—said the entire district was worried about a different Oberstar monstrosity: the Clean Water Restoration Act. Oberstar wrote and introduced it as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Unbelievably, it removed the word “navigable” from “waters of the United States” and substituted a list of more than 15 kinds of wet places (including “sandflats”) and all watersheds, ending with the horrifying clause “are subject to the legislative power of Congress.” Parmeter said, “Federal control over all watersheds means every square inch of America. It wasn’t even about water; it was a total land grab. And the media began to report it. It never passed.”

Then, during a rowdy, emotional, packed-auditorium debate in Duluth two weeks before Election Day, Oberstar made a fatal error. Cravaack had just said, “We must get rid of regulations. I trust you with your money. He trusts the government with your money,” pointing at Oberstar.

Then Oberstar warned that global warming was destroying everything and we must pass cap-and- trade regulations, to loud jeers and booing. Oberstar looked out at his audience and arrogantly said, “Global warming is real. You must be members of the Flat Earth Society.” “Insulting the constituency is what killed his vote,” said Parmeter. The Duluth News-Tribune quickly endorsed Cravaack.

When I interviewed Cravaak, I asked what his first priority was. He said, “I’m going to do everything I can to get those new mines permitted, operating, and creating jobs. This is a tremendous opportunity for economic recovery.”

Perhaps as a Christmas present to residents in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, the Republican leadership appointed Cravaack to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Washington Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.