posted May 26, 2006 04:04 PM            

I am a Quaternary geologist by profession. That is to say that my research interests are focused primarily on about the last 2 million years of Earth's history. An important aspect of my research is assessing past climate conditions. Thus I am also a paleoclimatologist. Earth's climate has varied considerably during the past 2 million years or so as indicated by the more than 33 glacial major advances and retreats that have occurred through this interval. Based on geologic paleoclimatic data it is obvious that climate is and has been very variable. Thus the only real constant about climate is change. It changes continually.

A primary role for climate researchers at present is to try and determine what the magnitude of natural climate variation is, and what sort of variation may be occurring at the present time is due to human induced causes. A major difficulty that we have is that the thermometer record only reaches back to the tail end of the 19th century. Unfortunately, many of the natural trends and cycles that occur in the natural climate system operate at scales that are longer than our thermometer record. A major question that needs to be addressed then hinges on determining whether the climate variability that has been observed through the 20th century -- during a warm-up that occurred at the end of the Little Ice Age that ended in the late 1800's, is unusual if you look at the larger paleoclimate record?

This is where paleoclimatologists like myself come in. Since thermometer records are so short we have to use what are termed proxy records. We look at records contained in the sediments, fossils, isotopes, etc. and then calibrate these records against thermometer records so that we can accurately determine past climate conditions in deep time.

A considerable portion of my research involves going out on research ships like the CCGS Tully to look at various fjords that are found along the British Columbia coast. This research is quite expensive and would not be possible without support in the form of a strategic project grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a grant from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.

The reason that fjords like Effingham Inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island are special is that these inlets have shallow sills that restrict circulation of water from the open ocean into deep water interior basins. Because circulation is restricted in these basins, the level of oxygen in the bottom water is greatly reduced, often completely oxygen free. As a result there is no bioturbation. Biotrubation is a technical way of saying that since there is no oxygen, there are no little organisms on the ocean bottom crawling around messing up the sediments.

As a result layers of sediment are laid down every year; two different ones in fact. In the summer when the area is influenced by the North Pacific High and nutrient bearing upwelling prevails phytoplankton blooms occur. Diatoms, which make up the majority of the phytoplankton, eventually die, and then sink quietly to the bottom where they are deposited as light colored layers, or bands. During the winter, the Aleutian Low dominates the climate of the area resulting in very rainy conditions. The rain tends to wash sediments in from the nearby land. This detrital material sinks quietly to the bottom of the inlet as well resulting in the darker layers.

As you might imagine, there are scarcely any two years that are exactly alike. Some years there will be higher plankton productivity. During other years it will be rainier. As a result there will be annual variability in both the thickness and the color of the darker and lighter layers. This succession of annually deposited layers comprises one of the best climate records in the world and are comparable to the records obtained from ice cores. In Effingham Inlet we have an almost complete record that spans the entire Holocene -- nearly 10,000 years!

posted May 26, 2006 04:08 PM            

We found good evidence of the 75-90 year Gleissberg Solar Cycle, the 200-500 year Suess Solar Cycle, and the 1,100 year Bond Solar Cycle with the shorter wavelength cycles apparently piggybacking on the longer ones. In the records from Effingham Inlet these cycles show up independently in all the isotopic, geochemical, sedimentological and paleontological proxies examined.

Although these British Columbia records, indicating a clear influence of the sun on climate, are very good they not the first studies to make such a correlation. Here are a couple of examples. The first graphic shows a clear correlation between global sea surface temperature and sunspot number. The warming as we came out of the Little Ice Age is very clear.

A second example is that of North American land temperature trends. The very close correlation between sunspot number and temperature is very clear. At present there have been literally hundreds of studies carried out showing a similar correlation.

And so, the big question a person on the street might ask is, why hasn't it been acknowledged that the sun is the major control over climate variability? Why do so many fingers point to CO2 as the major climate control? Well, the big problem until recently with a solar forcing scenario for climate change has been that the sun's energy output through an 11-year sunspot cycle varies only by around 0.1 percent. This energy output variability is insufficient on it's own, to cause the 0.6 degree Celsius increase in global temperature observed through the 20th century.

con't

posted May 26, 2006 04:17 PM            

Lets look at what happens through the course of a sunspot cycle. At the beginning of a cycle sunspots appear near the poles of the Sun. As a sunspot cycle progresses more and more develop and they start to migrate toward the sun's equatorial region. There is also a concomitant increase in solar flares as a sunspot cycle moves toward a peak, part of an internal cycle within the sun.

We therefore know the mechanics of what happens through a sunspot cycle and there is an excellent correlation between the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate, but until recently no way to explain the correlation. Before discussing a possible solution to this enigma it would be useful to discuss whether Earth's climate record actually supports the assumption that CO2 is a major climate driver. If one looks at the 20th century climate record some interesting observations merit discussion.

North American Land Temperature

Some questions immediately come to mind:

1. If CO2 is of such critical importance to climate change why was there a large temperature rise prior to the early 1940s when 80 percent of the human produced carbon dioxide was produced after World War II? 2. When CO2 levels finally began to increase dramatically in the postwar years why was there a concomitant interval of about 30 years of cooling? One would think that if CO2 had such critical control over climate that the relative abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere would be in lock step with global temperature. Many researchers realize the difficulties that are presented by trying to make CO2 the key factor in climate change. As a result there has been renewed research, much of it in the past year or so, into the idea that there really is a connection between variability in solar output and global temperature.

posted May 26, 2006 04:19 PM              

feelin' kinda dizzy...

posted May 26, 2006 04:22 PM            

This new interest in solar forcing of climate centers around ideas put forward by Dr. Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa that variability in the amount of galactic cosmic rays striking the earth are influential in climate change, acting as an amplifier. Galactic cosmic rays, are not really rays at all, but are basically stripped down neutrons and protons that are given off periodically throughout the galaxy when a supernova occurs. They bombard the solar system and earth continually. An interesting correlation has been observed between the sun spot cycle, galactic cosmic rays, and global cloudiness. The following diagram shows the abundance of low clouds colored in blue, which as you can see is cyclic.

The abundance of low clouds corresponds very closely to the level of solar radiance, as indicated by the green line. Both the proportion of low clouds and the level of solar radiance in turn correspond closely with the proportion of cosmic rays striking the Earth. They are all moving in concert with each other.

Thus the more cosmic rays that strikes the earth at any particular time, the more clouds that form. The more clouds that form, the lower global temperatures become, because they tend to bounce back warming sunlight. Since there is an observed 1.7 percent variation in low cloud formation between a solar maximum and minimum this is a significant variability capable of causing real climate change.

con't

posted May 26, 2006 04:26 PM            

In summary then we have galactic cosmic rays continually striking the earth. Independent of the cosmic rays striking the solar system the sun is continually going through sunspot cycles. As I mentioned previously, the amount of solar flaring follows the 11-year sun spot cycle, and varies even more through the longer Gleissberg, Suess and Bond solar cycles. The larger the number of flares produced by the sun, the fewer the proportion of cosmic rays that strike the earth, as these flares tend to deflect the cosmic rays.

Thus when cosmic rays are deflected away from the Earth there are fewer clouds, which permits a little bit more secondary radiation to penetrate to the surface. Thus we no longer have the problem caused by solar variability only varying by 0.1% through a sunspot cycle, the change in global cloudiness permits more than ample solar energy through, which can significantly change climate. There is now a viable explanation to explain the great correlation that has been observed between solar records and temperature records. The correlation gets even better through longer-scale solar cycles. For example, the intensity of cosmic rays varies by 15 percent through the 11-year sun spot cycle. At the longer wavelength decadal-scale Gleissberg, centennial-scale Seuss, and millennial-scale Bond cycles the cosmic ray intensity varies by up to four times that much, causing significant changes to the climate.

But if the sun is important to climate change what role do greenhouse gases play then? Greenhouse gases are really important. They make up something like 0.1 percent of our atmosphere and are a critical component of the Earths biosphere. If you listen to the rhetoric produced by some environmental groups one would come away with the understanding that , all greenhouse gases must be expunged. However, without them, the earth would be uninhabitable; it'd be too cold.

The media, special interest groups, and even some government produced literature all report that CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas. I was at the Canadian Museum of Nature a few months ago where a traveling display was set up that clearly, and erroneously I might add, indicated that CO2 was the most important greenhouse gas. The number one greenhouse gas is actually water vapor. It's something like 98 percent, by volume, of all greenhouse gases. I like the way that my colleague, Jan Veizer at the University of Ottawa, a world-renowned expert on the carbon cycle, lists the relative importance of greenhouse gases when he speaks on the topic. He points out that the number one greenhouse gas is water vapor, the number two greenhouse gas is water vapor, the number three greenhouse gas is water vapor, the number four greenhouse gas is water vapor and CO2 is a distant fifth. Of course, this list is somewhat facetious as there is only one type of water vapor. However, he lists the relative importance of greenhouse gases this was to indicate just how insignificant the tiny carbon dioxide cycle is to the water vapor cycle that it piggybacks on. To give you an example of this comparison lets consider the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the 19th century, when the world was relatively unindustrialized the level of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at around 285 ppm. By 2003 the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, primarily the result of industrialization and land use changes, stood at 376 ppm. The resultant influence on climate has been minimal. Computer models say that this increase in CO2 should have heated the Earth up significantly by this stage. However, very little warming that can be attributed to CO2 has actually occurred.

Now lets have a look at what happened during 1997-98. There was a major El Nio on in the equatorial Pacific, that many of you may recall had a significant influence on global weather. However, it also a major influence on global temperatures. They started to go up in response to the enormous amount of water vapor that was pumped up into the atmosphere. In just a few months global temperatures spiked by nearly 1 degree Celsius above what they had been before. If you watched any television at the time you would have heard newsreaders on all networks, almost gleefully exclaiming that we were seeing the major global warming that was supposed to occur. Much to their disappointment temperatures quickly dropped off again, within a few months, as the El Nio ebbed. That collapse in global temperatures didn't get any coverage by the media though. And, so, there we were, right back to normal. This example of El Nio fueled injection of water vapor into the atmosphere provides a very good example of the relative impact of CO2 and water vapor as greenhouse gases.

But what about CO2 and climate change? Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased to 376 ppm in 2003, about a 30 percent increase from pre-industrial times. Most of that increase has been due to fossil fuel burning and land use changes. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. CO2 can and does have an impact upon global temperatures. But what impact will it have? The idea put forward by the IPCC is that CO2 the major greenhouse gas and any increases in the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause a major warming in earth's climate. This scenario is at odds with the empirical evidence recorded in the geological record.

posted May 26, 2006 04:30 PM            

It is important to look at the empirical geological record of climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentrations and see what that tells us about the long-term correlation between climate and CO2 concentrations because that's a lot better than the 100 years of temperature records that we have.

Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii

Before looking at the geological record of CO2 it is useful to look at a schematic of our current understanding of the carbon cycle. Fossil fuel emissions coming from smokestack industries contribute about 5.5 gigatons (plus or minus 0.5 gigatons), land use changes contribute another 1.6 gigtons (plus or minus 0.7 gigatons), with a certain amount coming back into the biosphere again. About 2 gigatons (plus or minus 0.8 gigatons) of this returning CO2 is taken up by an oceanic sink. On top of this there is a mysterious, unaccounted for sink here of 1.8 gigatons (plus or minus 1.2 gigatons). As you might note there are significant error bars attached to all of these estimates meaning that considerable further research needs to be done on the dynamics of the carbon cycle. The average yearly increase of CO2 in the atmosphere ends up being about 3.3 gigatons of carbon staying in the atmosphere as part of a flux that totals around 730 gigatons.

con't

posted May 26, 2006 04:35 PM              

ironically there was also a massive extinction event ......is that what youre hoping to happen again?

**********

The Ordovician
490 to 443 Million Years Ago

The Ordovician period began approximately 510 million years ago, with the end of the Cambrian, and ended around 445 million years ago, with the beginning of the Silurian. At this time, the area north of the tropics was almost entirely ocean, and most of the world's land was collected into the southern super-continent Gondwana. Throughout the Ordovician, Gondwana shifted towards the South Pole and much of it was submerged underwater.

The Ordovician is best known for the presence of its diverse marine invertebrates, including graptolites, trilobites, brachiopods, and the conodonts (early vertebrates). A typical marine community consisted of these animals, plus red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals, crinoids, and gastropods. More recently, there has been found evidence of tetrahedral spores that are similar to those of primitive land plants, suggesting that plants invaded the land at this time.

posted May 26, 2006 04:36 PM            

Now let's look at the geologic record. I only want you to look at a couple of things on this diagram. First of all, please note in the top chart the varying amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years. At times in the past CO2 levels have been up to 16 times higher than at present.

The bottom chart shows the range of global temperature through the last 500 million years. There is no statistical correlation between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years and the temperature record in this interval. In fact, one of the highest levels of carbon dioxide concentration occurred during a major ice age that occurred about 450 million years ago. Carbon dioxide concentrations at that time were about 15 times higher than at present.

Let's move to a little bit more recent geological history. There have been about 33 glacial advances and retreats through the last two million years or so. Through the last 10,000 years we have been in the Holocene interglacial, a warm episode between the last glaciation and the next one that will begin in the relatively near, geologically speaking, future. The last glaciation peaked about 18,000 years ago with the ice sheets retreating rapidly over just a few thousand years. Before that there was another interglacial that began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 10,000 years. In Europe that interglacial is known as the Eemian. Here in North America it is known as the Sangamon. As one goes back in time these intervals of about 10,000 years of interglacial interspersed with episodes of about 100,000 years of glaciation continue.

What I would like to draw your attention to is the level of CO2 levels, as preserved in prehistoric air bubbles, from very high quality ice core records from Antarctica. When researchers first looked at the results from these cores they observed a repeating correlation between CO2 and temperature through several glacial/interglacial cycles. However, when they began to look at higher resolution cycles they say something different. They observed that temperature would go up first comes up first, with CO2 coming up later. This correlation indicates that as one might expect as temperatures warm biological productivity increases resulting in more CO2 in the atmosphere. The lag between CO2 and rising or falling CO2 levels is something like 800 years.

I teach a general climate change course. To get the significance of this correlation over to the students I use the following analogy. I tell the students that based on these records if you believe that climate is being driven by CO2 then they probably would have no difficulty in accepting the idea that Winston Churchill was instrumental in the defeat of King Herold by Duke William of Orange at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. If you can believe that this historical temporal incongruity could be feasible then you can have no problem believing that CO2 is what's driving Earth's climate system.

In conclusion, the geologic record clearly shows us that there really is little correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. Although CO2 can have a minor influence on global temperature the effect is minimal and short lived as this cycle sits on top of the much larger water cycle, which is what truly controls global temperatures. The water cycle is in turn primarily influenced by natural celestial cycles and trends.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M

posted May 26, 2006 05:04 PM              

Factcheck.org

Scientist to CEI: You Used My Research To "Confuse and Mislead"

The Competitive Enterprise Institute runs ads saying "The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker." A professor objects, saying CEI deliberately misrepresents his research.

May 26, 2006

Summary
The business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released two ads last week to "counter global warming alarmism."

One of the ads says research shows "The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner. . . Why are they trying to scare us?" Actually, scientists say increased snowfall in Antarctica's interior is evidence that global warming is taking place. Scientists also say that the ice sheet is melting at the ocean's edge and a recent report says it is shrinking overall.

The ads drew a protest from a University of Missouri professor who says they are "a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate." He said one of them misuses a study he published in Science magazine last year on the Antarctic ice sheet. An editor of Science also said the ads misrepresent the findings of that study as well as a second study on Greenland's glaciers.

The second CEI ad notes that carbon dioxide (CO2) is "essential to life," and says, "they call it pollution. We call it life." That ad fails to mention that too much CO2 can cause global temperatures to rise or that there is more of it in the atmosphere than any time during the last 420,000 years.

CEI, which gets just over 9 per cent of its budget from Exxon Mobil Corporation, said it was only trying to make sure the public hears "both sides of the story."

Analysis

CEI released two ads last week as part of a $50,000 ad buy in 14 cities scheduled to take place from May 18th to May 28th.

CEI Ad: "Glaciers"

Announcer: You've seen those headlines about Global Warming. The glaciers are melting. We’re doomed! That's what several studies supposedly found.
(The Cover of Science Magazine is shown opening up)
Announcer: But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite: Greenland ’s glaciers are growing, not melting; The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner. Did you see any big headlines about that? Why are they trying to scare us? Global warming alarmists claim the glaciers are melting because of carbon dioxide from the fuels we use. Let’s force people to cut back, they say.

But we depend on those fuels to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives. And as for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke. It’s what we breathe out and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

Misrepresenting Conclusions

The CEI ad "Glacier" quotes two studies in Science magazine, one as saying " Greenland’s glaciers are growing, not melting" and the other as saying "The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner." That drew quick objection from an editor of Science and from the author of the Antarctica study.

Brooks Hanson, a deputy editor at Science, complained in a May 19 news release that CEI was misrepresenting both the studies and also the general state of scientific knowledge:

Hanson: The text of the CEI ad misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers and our current state of knowledge by selective referencing.

The lead author of the Antarctica study, University of Missouri professor Curt Davis, said in the same release that CEI was twisting his findings deliberately to mislead the public:

Davis: "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate. They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public.

For one thing, the release said, Davis' study only reported growth for the East Antarctic ice sheet, not the entire Antarctic ice sheet. More importantly, it said that growth of the interior ice sheet is just what scientists had predicted would happen as a consequence of global climate warming, bringing about more snowfall in previously arid regions of the continent.

Davis's study indicated the increased ice accumulation in the interior might be offsetting the loss of ice at the coastal regions, or might not. It said that whether the entire ice sheet is shrinking "will depend on the balance between mass changes on the interior and those in coastal areas."

What CEI Says

CEI posted a rejoinder to this criticism on their website. In it, they say:

CEI: Professor Davis admits that he doesn't know whether the coastal losses offset or outweigh the gains in the interior. This is precisely our point - the public needs to hear both sides of the story not just the coastal loss, if they are to judge whether we face an imminent catastrophe justifying policies that would drastically affect our way of life.

Actually, a more recent study (also published in Science magazine) says satellite measurements show that the ice sheet as a whole is in fact shrinking "significantly," and that most of the loss is taking place in the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet.

That study, by Isabella Velicogna of the University of Colorado and John Wahr of the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used satellite measures of gravity to estimate the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet during 2002–2005. "We found that the mass of the ice sheet decreased significantly," the study said. It estimated the rate of loss at between 80 and 152 cubic kilometers of ice per year.

Greenland, too

As for Greenland, the CEI ad says its glaciers "are growing, not melting." That's a misrepresentation of a study by five scientists from Norway, Russia and the US published by Science magazine in November 2005. That study did report that the ice sheet in the interior of Greenland had grown thicker over the 11 years ending in 2003. But it reached no conclusion about whether "Greenland's glaciers" were growing or melting overall. The study said it is conceivable that melting at the coast more than offset the growth in the interior, and that the "the 11-year-long data set developed here remains too brief to establish long-term trends." It called for more measurement by newer, better satellite sensors to calculate what is going on with Greenland's glaciers overall.

A more recent study in Science, published in February, reports that Greenland's glaciers accelerated their movement to the sea between 1996 and 2000. It concluded, "As more glaciers accelerate farther north, the contribution of Greenland to sea-level rise will continue to increase. "

CO2: Too Much of a Good thing

A second ad, "Energy," downplays the adverse effects of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere by identifying it as a natural biological occurrence.

CEI Ad: "Energy"

Announcer: There’s something in these pictures you can’t see. It’s essential to life. We breathe it out.Plants breathe it in. It comes from animal life, the oceans, the earth, and the fuels we find in it. It’s called carbon dioxide---CO2. The fuels that produce C02 have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love. Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then? Carbon dioxide.

They call it pollution. We call it life.

The ad correctly asserts, "we breathe it out, plants breathe it in." As many of us learned in high school biology classes, humans and animals breathe in oxygen and out carbon dioxide, and plants take in the carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
The ad goes on to say, "they call it pollution, we call it life." It is true that some politicians and environmental groups want to label CO2 as a "pollutant." Several environmental groups, states and municipalities are currently suing the EPA to do so.

But they are doing so for regulatory purposes so that CO2 emissions can be brought under the Clean Air Act. Nobody is claiming that they are as damaging to health as nitrous forms of pollutants such as smog and smoke. But in June 2005, the science academies of 11 leading industrial nations (including the National Academy of Sciences from the US) released a statement listing CO2 as a greenhouse gas and saying :

Joint Statement: Carbon Dioxide levels have increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to over 375 ppm today - higher than any previous levels that can be reliably measured (i.e. in the last 420,000 years). Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise .

Heeding his own advice

Even though CEI minimizes the impact of carbon dioxide, they still take Al Gore to task for his carbon footprint as a result of his travel surrounding his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation and documentary.

They posted a video with their TV ads as a "special web only bonus." It includes quotes from Gore's film about taking personal accountability for global warming with such actions as telecommuting, and limiting air travel. The video then shows Gore's lengthy air travel schedule and displays a rolling meter of carbon dioxide output and challenging Gore to start "walking the walk."

He says he is. According to NativeEnergy, Paramount Classics and Participant Productions plan to announce that they offset 100% of the global warming impact from production activities. In addition, NativeEnergy is offsetting all CO2 from Mr. Gore’s travel to discuss and promote the film and book. This is achieved by calculating how much CO2 your activities produce and purchasing the corresponding amount of credits to generate renewable energy.

Who funds CEI

CEI is supported, in part, by several major corporations and corporate foundations, including oil companies, according to the liberal organization SourceWatch. In 2004 CEI declared revenues of $2,919,537 with the IRS, according to their Form 990. Just over 9 per cent of that total, $270,000, came from donations from ExxonMobil, according to the oil company's 2004 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments Report. Exxon said two-thirds of their donation was earmarked for "Global Climate Change and Global Climate Change Outreach."

by Justin Bank

Sources

Davis, Curt H.; Yonghang, Li; McConnell, Joseph R.; Frey, Markus M.; Hanna, Edward, "Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise."

Eilperin, Juliet, "Antarctic Ice Sheet is Melting," Washington Post . 3 March 2005.

Johannessen, Ola M.; Khvorostovsky, Kirill; Miles, Martin W.; Bobylev, Leonid P., "Recent Ice Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland," Science . 11 Nov 2005.

Rignot, Eric and Kanagaratnam, "Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet," Science. 17 Feb 2006.

Vedantam, Shankar, "Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Level," Washington Post. 17 Feb 2006.

Velicogna, Isabella and Wahr, John, "Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica," Science. 24 March 2006.

Vergano, Dan, "Greenland Glacier Runoff Doubles over Past Decade," USA Today . 17 Feb 2006.

Press Release, "MU Professor Refutes National Television Ads Downplaying Global Warming," University of Missouri. 19 May 2006.

Press Release, "CEI Launches Ad Campaign to Counter Global Warming Alarmism," CEI, 17 May 2005.

Joint Statement of Science Academies: Global Response to Climate Change, 2005.

posted May 26, 2006 05:26 PM              

unfortunately these events always seem to be directly tied to mass extinctions.....

***********

Fresh evidence to show an impact from space lay behind the demise of the
dinosaurs has been published by scientists.

The researchers say analysis of fossil leaves from 65 million years ago
shows there was a sudden and dramatic rise in carbon dioxide in the
Earth's atmosphere.

Only the impact of a large asteroid, vaporising billions of tonnes of
limestone rocks, could have released so much gas so quickly into the
environment, they believe.

Their calculations suggest the change in CO2 levels would have led to
catastrophic global warming, making it impossible for the ancient reptiles
and countless other lifeforms to continue.
...
But suspicions still remain that a vast "flood" of lava and gas in India
at about the same time may have been the more decisive factor in
"poisoning" the planet's biology.

Now, researchers from the University of Sheffield, UK, and Southwest Texas
State University and Pennsylvania State University, US, have estimated
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the period.

They studied leaf fossils of gingkoes and ferns that grew around the time
of the dinosaurs' demise.

The number of carbon dioxide-absorbing pores in the fossils reflects the
amount of carbon dioxide in the air: the fewer the pores, the more carbon
dioxide.

By using computer simulations and doing real experiments on plants, the
scientists can show there was a sudden, five-fold increase in CO2 at the
end of the Cretaceous.

This can only be explained, they believe, by the sudden vaporisation of
between 6,400 and 13,000 billion tonnes of carbon - a substantial
component of the limestone rocks that lined the shallow sea that existed
at Chicxulub 65 million years ago.

Such an injection of CO2 into the atmosphere could have created blistering
heatwave, raising global temperatures by as much as 7.5 Celsius.

"We estimate that the CO2 levels were four to five times higher for 10,000
years after the impact," Sheffield's Professor David Beerling told BBC
News Online.

"The trouble with the [volcanism in India] is that it is spread over two
million years. If you release that much CO2 into the atmosphere at that
rate, the oceans will just suck it straight back out.

"So, the only thing that can explain such a large and sudden jump in CO2
would be this idea of a space impact."
http://dml.cmnh.org/2002Jun/msg00213.html

posted June 01, 2006 09:30 AM            

Lies and statistics

Posted: May 31, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern
WorldNetDaily.com

Don't bother arguing the facts of climate change with "global warming" zealots.

They simply make up the facts to support their theory.

Of course, that wouldn't be so bad if these lies were questioned, challenged, even considered against common sense by a media elite all too willing to conclude the world is heating up as a result of industrialization, capitalism and man's avarice and activity on the planet.

An amazing example of this phenomenon – I call it the "global warming media meltdown theory" – took place yesterday in one of the nation's largest newspapers, USA Today.

In a front-page news story by Elizabeth Weise, the national newspaper cited "forest ecologist" Glenn Juday as the source of what would be truly alarming data – if only it had any basis in truth.

"Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised the state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks."

Now, back in the old days of my newspaper career, we had editors who actually looked at incredible claims made in stories, questioned them and struck out some of the more preposterous and bizarre assertions.

I guess this practice has been abandoned by Gannett and USA Today. Either that or the newspaper publisher has begun hiring arithmetically challenged reporters and editors as part of its diversity policies.

Think about this: If it were true that average winter temperatures in Alaska have increased 6 degrees Fahrenheit annually since 1950, it would mean average winter temperatures in Alaska are now 336 degrees higher than they were in 1950. Average summer temperatures, according to this statement would be 196 degrees higher, if we are to believe the nonsensical claim of a 3.5 degrees annual rise.

(As a result of this column, the USA Today online article has now been corrected without comment.)

Now how does this happen?

How is it that a self-proclaimed "forest ecologist" can get himself quoted on the front page of a national newspaper making an assertion so unbelievable that a grade-school student should be able to see through it?

Why has the nation allowed itself to become so bamboozled by the global-warming fanatics that we will believe whatever they spoon-feed us no matter how much it defies logic and common sense?

It's not just one source. It's not just one media outlet. It's not just the factual details involved in the climate-change debate. It's the whole enchilada. Seldom in history have so many people been so deliberately fooled.

Please hear what I am saying – and hear it clearly. I do not doubt for one minute that the earth's climate is changing. That is beyond dispute. In fact, change is the rule with regard to the earth's climate, not the exception. But are the real changes we've detected the result of man's activity on the planet? I see no reason to believe that. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Furthermore, so many of the so-called "facts" of this debate are made up out of whole cloth – unchallenged, they get published, broadcast and spread around as if they are gospel truth.

It's hardly just USA Today. But, amazingly, as of this writing, the article had not been corrected (though it may be at any moment after this column is published). I don't know how that happens. I know that if WorldNetDaily published a grossly absurd assertion by some pseudo-authority, the calls for retraction, correction and clarification would be overwhelming and instantaneous.

posted June 01, 2006 10:10 AM            

Now how the hell could that be? There were no greedy capitalists driving SUV's, no smokestacks spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, in fact there were no humans.

Perhaps it was the hip Dino the Dinosaur set which had progressed to capitalism who were driving those CO2 spewing, carbon fuel powered vehicles of 55 million years ago.

Or perhaps the reptilian set just got damned fed up with the cold climate and decided to do something about it. I can see them sitting around in their councils hashing plans to change earth's climate.

The plan they might have come up with...a plan that makes as much sense as the current global warming theory of the crackpot scientist set...probably involved nothing more complex than, a "Fart a Day for Earth".

All over the earth, these reptiles were gathering legumes...to save the Earth. Wouldn't want to be caught fartless and let the effort down.

Here these crackpot scientists are..still clinging to their nonsense that CO2 is raising the earth's temperature and ignoring, indeed dismissing the main cause of climate change...natural cycles of the sun's radiation output. Radiation output which strikes the earth's oceans, heats the water which increases evaporation and puts additional water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a vastly more efficient heat trap than CO2.

But then, to admit that would be to forego all those research grants, all that money, all that prestige and all that power being transferred to the utterly corrupt UN.

So, ignore, ignore, ignore, lie, lie, lie and submit falsified results from corrupted computer models designed to give a predetermined result. That's the crackpot science way.

posted June 01, 2006 10:13 AM            

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.

The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists' understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic.

Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.

"Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is," said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

The studies draw on the work of a pioneering 2004 expedition that defied the Arctic Ocean ice and pulled the first significant samples from the ancient layered seabed 150 miles from the North Pole: 1,400 feet of slender shafts of muck, fossils of ancient organisms and rock representing a climate history that dates back 56 million years.

While there is ample fossil evidence around the edges of the Arctic Ocean showing great past swings in climate, until now the sediment samples from the undersea depths had gone back less than 400,000 years.

The new analysis confirms that the Arctic Ocean warmed remarkably 55 million years ago, which is when many scientists say the extraordinary planetwide warm-up called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum must have been caused by an enormous outburst of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases like methane and carbon dioxide. But no one has found a clear cause for the gas discharge. Almost all climate experts agree that the present-day gas buildup is predominantly a result of emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.

The samples also chronicle the subsequent cooling, with many ups and downs, that the researchers say began about 45 million years ago and led to the cycles of ice ages and brief warm spells of the last several million years.

Experts not connected with the studies say they support the idea that heat-trapping gases — not slight variations in Earth's orbit — largely determine warming and cooling.

"The new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future," said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.

The $12.5 million Arctic Coring Expedition, run by a consortium called the International Ocean Drilling Program, was the first to drill deep into the layers of sediment deposited over millions of years in the Arctic. The samples were gathered late in the summer of 2004 as two icebreakers shattered huge drifting floes so that a third ship could hold its position and bore for core samples.

Estimates of the prevailing temperatures in the different eras represented by the sediments were made in part by tracking the comings and goings of certain algae called dinoflagellates that typically indicate subtropical or tropical conditions.

Because the samples lacked remains of shell-bearing plankton that are usually relied on to provide temperature records, the researchers used a newer method for approximating past temperatures: gauging changes in the chemical composition of the remains of a primitive phylum of microbes called Crenarchaeota.

Some scientists familiar with the research said that while there were still questions about the precision of this method at temperatures like those in the ancient Arctic Ocean, it was clear that the area was warm.

The temperatures recorded in the samples, right through the peak of warming 55 million years ago, were consistently about 18 degrees higher than those projected by computer models trying to "backcast" what the Arctic was like at the time, according to one of the papers.

Another significant discovery came in layers from 49 million years ago, where conditions suddenly fostered the summertime growth of vast mats of an ancient cousin of the Azolla duckweed that now cloaks suburban ponds. The researchers propose that this occurred when straits closed between the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The flow of water from precipitation and rivers created a great pool of fresh water, but about 800,000 years after the blossoming of duckweed began, it ended with a sudden warming of a few additional degrees. The researchers suggest that this signaled when shifting land formations reconnected the Arctic with the Atlantic, allowing salty, warmer water to flow in, killing off the weed.

The researchers said the sediments held hints that Earth's long slide to colder conditions, and the recent cycle of ice ages and brief thaws, began quite soon after the hothouse conditions 50 million years ago. A centerpiece of their argument is a single pebble, about the size of a chickpea, found in a layer created 45 million years ago.

The stone could have been deposited on the raised undersea ridge only if it had been carried overhead in ice, said Kathryn Moran, a chief scientist on the drilling project, who teaches at the University of Rhode Island.

The stone was probably embedded in an iceberg or perhaps a plate of sea ice that tore free from a gravelly shore. It sank as the ice melted or broke apart, Dr. Moran proposed. Such "dropstones" have long been used to date when an oceanic region has been ice covered or ice free.

The amount of ice-carried debris in the sediment layers began to increase about 14 million years ago, the scientists said. That is also about when the great ice sheet that now weighs down eastern Antarctica originated, Dr. Moran noted. In general, the results from the Arctic drilling project suggest that the cooling and ice buildup at both poles happened in relative lockstep.

This simultaneity tends to support the idea that the cooling was caused by a drop in concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, which mix uniformly in the global atmosphere, said Dr. Moran and other members of the team.

Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts, an expert in past Arctic climates who was not connected with the new studies, cautioned against giving too much significance to the single sample, and particularly the single stone from 45 million years ago.

Dr. Brigham-Grette said it was vital to try to mesh the new core results with data gathered around Arctic coasts, where there is plenty of evidence for warm conditions in at least some places as recently as 2.4 million years ago.

Despite her doubts, she said, the project was a stunning achievement.

posted June 01, 2006 06:59 PM              

quote:

---

Only the impact of a large asteroid, vaporising billions of tonnes of
limestone rocks, could have released so much gas so quickly into the
environment, they believe.

Their calculations suggest the change in CO2 levels would have led to
catastrophic global warming, making it impossible for the ancient reptiles
and countless other lifeforms to continue.

---

posted June 01, 2006 07:11 PM            

quote:

---

Now, I'm finished with the topic. -Jwhop

---

Guess not, huh?

posted June 01, 2006 09:11 PM              

"ooh ooh, aah aah, ooh ooh, aah aah!!"

posted June 03, 2006 03:08 PM            

My personal favorite occurred at a speech in Tennessee in 2004, when Mr. Gore accused President Bush of lying to the American public in order to justify American military action in Iraq, howling that "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!"

Ironically, "playing on our fears" is precisely what Mr. Gore is doing with his soon-to-be-released movie "An Inconvenient Truth" which, according to its trailer, is "by far, the most terrifying film you will ever see." The related website mentioned at the end of the trailer tells us that "...humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."

Scary stuff, indeed, but hardly surprising coming from a man who as recently as last year tried to amplify public concern over global warming by playing on our fears of the two most heartbreaking events in recent American history, the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

"I don't want to diminish the threat of terrorism at all," Mr. Gore told Australian Age in November 2005. "It is extremely serious. But on a long-term global basis, global warming is the most serious problem we are facing."

And in September 2005, Mr. Gore told the Financial Times "Katrina is the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again. It is up to us [to tackle climate change]."

However, according to the National Hurricane Center http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml , our first taste of wicked weather occurred at least as far back as the 1850s when six major hurricanes (defined as categories 3,4 and 5) struck the U.S. Furthermore, the most intense period of major hurricanes on record occurred in the 30 years between 1931 and 1960, when we experienced a total of 26. During the following 30 years, when fossil fuel consumption dramatically increased, we experienced only 15.

It will be interesting to see how (or rather, if) Mr. Gore deals with this Inconvenient Truth.

Then again, to be fair, perhaps we should assume that Mr. Gore knows something the National Hurricane Center does not, and that we really do have "just ten years to avert a major catastrophe." How then do we stop this threat which, according to Mr. Gore, makes global terrorism seem small by comparison?

Mr. Gore and his environmentalist friends from Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other like-minded organizations assure us that the answer lies in the U.S. joining the bandwagon of other nations who have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which would mean drastically reducing our consumption of energy in order to bring CO2 emissions to a level lower than they were in 1990.

However, growing economies tend to use more energy, not less. In fact, most of the countries who did sign the Kyoto Protocol -- including Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and New Zealand -- have failed to curb their emissions to the required levels. Worse, Japan is emitting 7.4% more more than its 1990 level, and Canada is emitting 24% more.

During Mr. Gore's eight years as vice president, the Clinton administration never submitted the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification, probably because they knew it would be defeated due to the impact reduced energy consumption would have on the U.S. economy. But even if they had, and even if all of the countries who signed Kyoto were able to reduce their CO2 emissions, it would probably have had little if any impact on future warming.

According to Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a former Greenpeace member, climate models show that if everyone, including the U.S., met their Kyoto obligations throughout the century, it would slow down warming by just six years, and would cost nearly $15 trillion.

Besides man-made CO2, a number of other factors which are beyond our control appear to be affecting the global climate, including the sun's varying energy output, volcanic eruptions and deforestation.

Regardless of how much Mr. Gore's movie plays on our fears, the fact remains that any attempt to reduce CO2 emissions -- no matter how painful -- will probably have little impact on global climate change.

posted June 03, 2006 03:22 PM            

Just as the media have always relied on glaciers in climate change stories, they now rely on certain talking heads to make their points about global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore has become a major spokesman for the environmental movement and an advocate for larger and more intrusive bureaucracy to fend off climate change.

Currently, Gore is promoting his second global warming book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which also has a companion film. The trailer from the new movie claims ominously: “Our ability to live is what is at stake.”

His latest effort has already begun to generate new media attention about Gore’s global warming efforts. Incredibly, there have been more than 1,000 print stories containing Al Gore and global warming since Earth Day 2004 – and that was before his new book.

Gore first published “Earth in the Balance” in 1992, a book on “ecology and the human spirit” that advocated for worldwide treaties to control the environmental efforts of every nation. The book contained a 65-page chapter about “A Global Marshall Plan.” This environmental plan would help us “grapple with the enormous challenge we now face.”

He said he rejected the notion of a world government and instead advocated international agreements establishing “global constraints on acceptable behavior.”

These “voluntarily” entered, “fair” agreements would contain incentives and non-compliance penalties, but could impact rich nations like the United States more than others.

The United Nations should consider establishing a “Stewardship Council” to monitor the green treaties and handle the global environment, he said. Yearly environmental meetings for bureaucrats would become necessary.

Gore lectures regularly on human-caused global warming. A typical example was his Jan. 15, 2004, New York appearance.

He spoke at the Beacon Theater and thanked leaders of MoveOn.org, teaching that the “wealthy right-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudo-scientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public’s mind about global warming.”
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice_algore.asp

posted June 03, 2006 03:29 PM            

By R. Warren Anderson
Research Analyst

It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age.

The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.”

Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature.

Following the ice age threats from the late 1800s, fears of an imminent and icy catastrophe were compounded in the 1920s by Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan and an obsession with the news of his polar expedition. As the Times put it on Feb. 24, 1895, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.”

Those concerns lasted well into the late 1920s. But when the earth’s surface warmed less than half a degree, newspapers and magazines responded with stories about the new threat. Once again the Times was out in front, cautioning “the earth is steadily growing warmer.”

After a while, that second phase of climate cautions began to fade. By 1954, Fortune magazine was warming to another cooling trend and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.” As the United States and the old Soviet Union faced off, the media joined them with reports of a more dangerous Cold War of Man vs. Nature.

The New York Times ran warming stories into the late 1950s, but it too came around to the new fears. Just three decades ago, in 1975, the paper reported: “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable.”

That trend, too, cooled off and was replaced by the current era of reporting on the dangers of global warming. Just six years later, on Aug. 22, 1981, the Times quoted seven government atmospheric scientists who predicted global warming of an “almost unprecedented magnitude.”

In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming. Some current warming stories combine the concepts and claim the next ice age will be triggered by rising temperatures – the theme of the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow.”

Recent global warming reports have continued that trend, morphing into a hybrid of both theories. News media that once touted the threat of “global warming” have moved on to the more flexible term “climate change.” As the Times described it, climate change can mean any major shift, making the earth cooler or warmer. In a March 30, 2006, piece on ExxonMobil’s approach to the environment, a reporter argued the firm’s chairman “has gone out of his way to soften Exxon’s public stance on climate change.”

The effect of the idea of “climate change” means that any major climate event can be blamed on global warming, supposedly driven by mankind.

Spring 2006 has been swamped with climate change hype in every type of media – books, newspapers, magazines, online, TV and even movies.

One-time presidential candidate Al Gore, a patron saint of the environmental movement, is releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” in book and movie form, warning, “Our ability to live is what is at stake.”

Despite all the historical shifting from one position to another, many in the media no longer welcome opposing views on the climate. CBS reporter Scott Pelley went so far as to compare climate change skeptics with Holocaust deniers.

“If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel,” Pelley asked, “am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” he said in an interview on March 23 with CBS News’s PublicEye blog.

He added that the whole idea of impartial journalism just didn’t work for climate stories. “There becomes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible,” he said.

Pelley’s comments ignored an essential point: that 30 years ago, the media were certain about the prospect of a new ice age. And that is only the most recent example of how much journalists have changed their minds on this essential debate.

Some in the media would probably argue that they merely report what scientists tell them, but that would be only half true.

Journalists decide not only what they cover; they also decide whether to include opposing viewpoints. That’s a balance lacking in the current “debate.”

This isn’t a question of science. It’s a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science.

posted June 03, 2006 03:33 PM            

Global Cooling: 1954-1976

The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear era, but I have no fear
’Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river
-- The Clash
“London Calling,”
released in 1979

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.

Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.

Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974.

“It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude,” the article continued.

That article also emphasized Bryson’s extreme doomsday predictions. “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.”

Bryson warned, “It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” However, the world population increased by 2.5 billion since that warning.

Fortune had been emphasizing the cooling trend for 20 years. In 1954, it picked up on the idea of a frozen earth and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.”

The story debunked the notion that “despite all you may have read, heard, or imagined, it’s been growing cooler – not warmer – since the Thirties.”

The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming.

“The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.”

If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.”

There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said.

If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued.

Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

A city in a snow globe illustrated that March 1, 1975, article, while the cover showed an ice age obliterating an unfortunate city.

In 1975, cooling went from “one of the most important problems” to a first-place tie for “death and misery.” “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.”

He claimed it was not his disposition to be a “doomsday man.” His analysis came from “the facts [that] have emerged” about past ice ages, according to the July/August International Wildlife Magazine.

The idea of a worldwide deep freeze snowballed.

Naturally, science fiction authors embraced the topic. Writer John Christopher delivered a book on the coming ice age in 1962 called “The World in Winter.”

In Christopher’s novel, England and other “rich countries of the north” broke down under the icy onslaught.

“The machines stopped, the land was dead and the people went south,” he explained.

James Follett took a slightly different tack. His book “Ice” was about “a rogue Antarctic iceberg” that “becomes a major world menace.” Follett in his book conceived “the teeth chattering possibility of how Nature can punish those who foolishly believe they have mastered her.”

posted June 03, 2006 03:36 PM            

Global Warming: 1929-1969

Today’s global warming advocates probably don’t even realize their claims aren’t original. Before the cooling worries of the ’70s, America went through global warming fever for several decades around World War II.

The nation entered the “longest warm spell since 1776,” according to a March 27, 1933, New York Times headline. Shifting climate gears from ice to heat, the Associated Press article began “That next ice age, if one is coming … is still a long way off.”

One year earlier, the paper reported that “the earth is steadily growing warmer” in its May 15 edition. The Washington Post felt the heat as well and titled an article simply “Hot weather” on August 2, 1930.

That article, reminiscent of a stand-up comedy routine, told readers that the heat was so bad, people were going to be saying, “Ah, do you remember that torrid summer of 1930. It was so hot that * * *.”

The Los Angeles Times beat both papers to the heat with the headline: “Is another ice age coming?” on March 11, 1929. Its answer to that question: “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.”

Meteorologist J. B. Kincer of the federal weather bureau published a scholarly article on the warming world in the September 1933 “Monthly Weather Review.”

The article began discussing the “wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather” and asked “Is our climate changing?” Kincer proceeded to document the warming trend. Out of 21 winters examined from 1912-33 in Washington, D.C., 18 were warmer than normal and all of the past 13 were mild.

New Haven, Conn., experienced warmer temperatures, with evidence from records that went “back to near the close of the Revolutionary War,” claimed the analysis. Using records from various other cities, Kincer showed that the world was warming.

British amateur meteorologist G. S. Callendar made a bold claim five years later that many would recognize now. He argued that man was responsible for heating up the planet with carbon dioxide emissions – in 1938.

It wasn’t a common notion at the time, but he published an article in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society on the subject. “In the following paper I hope to show that such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring at the present time,” Callendar wrote. He went on the lecture circuit describing carbon-dioxide-induced global warming.

But Callendar didn’t conclude his article with an apocalyptic forecast, as happens in today’s global warming stories. Instead he said the change “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.” Furthermore, it would allow for greater agriculture production and hold off the return of glaciers “indefinitely.”

On November 6 the following year, The Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article titled “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise.” It began, “Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout [sic] the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades.”

The rising mercury trend continued into the ’50s. The New York Times reported that “we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” on Aug. 10, 1952. According to the Times, the evidence was the introduction of cod in the Eskimo’s diet – a fish they had not encountered before 1920 or so. The following year, the paper reported that studies confirmed summers and winters were getting warmer.

This warming gave the Eskimos more to handle than cod. “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures,” announced the Times during the middle of winter, on Feb. 15, 1959. Glaciers were melting in Alaska and the “ice in the Arctic ocean is about half as thick as it was in the late nineteenth century.”

A decade later, the Times reaffirmed its position that “the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two,” according to polar explorer Col. Bernt Bachen in the Feb. 20, 1969, piece.

One of the most surprising aspects of the global warming claims of the 20th Century is that they followed close behind similar theories of another major climate change – that one an ice age.