Their Perpetual Lies
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With debt of a magnitude few of us can readily conceive, with trade deficits of enormous proportions, with a gutted manufacturing sector and the ruthless reduction of the community of skilled factory workers, with a corporate culture that has lost its traditional dedication to real investment, productivity and production in favour of "ownership" and speculative enterprise, the United States appears to be moving rapidly along the road to ruin. The most forbidding of economic crises - with a variety of themes, aspects and complexities - seems to threaten just a short distance down that road from where we are now. If and when it arrives, a turmoil and misery to put the Great Depression of the 1930s to shame could afflict the American economy and the American people - and persist perhaps for a decade or more.
James Cumes, America's Suicidal State Craft.
And collapsed, and seen for the future, old fashioned socialists running the country, his own darkness and dysfunction long forgotten as a bunch of snivelling self-serving idiots ran the country into the ground. More tax, yet more and more tax. Not only did they sell the farm, they obliterated what was left of the economy. Australia became a country that didn't make anything, that didn't have a normal manufacturing base, that had been led by fools and dissed for the toss, the population taken for fools. Oh no, don't let this happen, ancient souls cried, but it was too late, it was already happening.
Kevin Rudd has been to the socialist citadel, the United Nations, gave a speech which made him look like a high school debating leader struggling with difficult concepts, accepted the applause which was not his due, entered the limousine he had not paid for, ate food supplied by the Australian taxpayer, and took us all for a ride. It was the contempt for the common man that got him. None of these people had worked a real day in their lives. They all wore white ribbons the other day in parliament, queuing up to get on the band wagon and show that they were against domestic violence, that all men were patriarchal brutes, that government statistics showing men are twice as likely to be the victims of violence as women are irrelevant in the face of blind feminist ideology, and peddling more lies as they swim in a soup of self-congratulatory nonsense.
It's sick making, the lot of it. Nothing works. We spend half the day trapped on the M5, and get charged a toll for the privilege. We are shattered and the darkness of a decaying culture wreaks havoc on the land. Oh how could you, how could you, but the Spanish passed laws making it illegal to encourage a woman in a traditional role, given time the Australian government will do the same, when they think of it, and that bustling matriarch he saw that special day, happy, busy, surrounded by children and grandchildren, will become technically illegal. My own grandmothers, who each bought up six kids during the Depression, would likewise become illegal. And all was lost, lost, as the plutocrats and bureaucrats take over, destroying our lives.
They suck every last cent off the populace and wonder why the nation is sinking into despair. Mortgage stress has become the living norm in Western Sydney, and dark days were eating away at the cosy world he was trying to create. He slept like a log, while the cute boy in Pye said something similar, I've got to go and lay a log. Do you mind? Some things I don't need to know. Healthy, happy, in their prime, the flashes of youth were everywhere as a new generation pushed into prominence, unable to imagine the past, unable to think, even superficially, of what was happening and what was about to happen. He needed to go bush. He needed to escape. He was sure there were shadows on the skirting of time, he sought to avoid the consequence.
The financial meltdown in America has made everyone nervous. Australia is protected, Australia is in good shape, Treasurer Wayne Swan declares in blustering, unconvincing tones. It's obvious to almost everyone he has no idea what he is talking about, winging it desperately. Nobody has any money any more. Every move has a cost, GST, parking fines, speeding fines, highway tolls. Rents escalate. The spirits from the 30s, the working class spirits on which the nation was based, are sitting on spectral fences, crowing, warning, watching. There are ways to survive all this. Destroy yourselves, destroy your own prosperity, destroy the economy, and we will all be bombed back to the dark ages.
Spectral in their lunacy, the ghosts of beggars and unemployed men, the tramps who walked the country looking for work, all they sought was the decency of labour and the comfort of a full belly, while the self congratulatory socialists, abusive to their core, swanned around in their government limousines and government jets, Rudd listing his points, one, two, three, asking himself questions, explaining, explaining, over-exposed, his massive ego needing to be constantly fed. He's still standing up in the polls, amazingly, the population is slow to forgive the conservatives their sins, their own socialist welfare policies, their own big taxing ways. The old saying: they're each as bad as the other, came true. There is nowhere to turn. No one in power has a shed of decency. They are all compromised, all dishonest, all divorced from a day's work for a day's pay; and in the end we will all pay for their preening self-aggrandisement, their self-serving flattering, their perpetual lies. Have you no heart, no conscience, no perception? Apparently not.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
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Phil Chapman | April 23, 2008
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.
For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.
We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.
We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.
The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.
All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.
It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.
In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."
Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
Congress Fiddled With Warming While Earth Cooled
By Marc Sheppard
Last week Democrats tried to kill the economy in the name of solving a problem that doesn't exist. Republicans should hang this bill around their necks in every district where an incumbent voted for the woefully misnamed and deservedly DOA Climate Security Act, technically S.3036.
Asking Americans to pony up even more at the pump with already record gasoline prices creeping higher almost daily seems offensive enough. But compelling such burden under the guise of moral imperative to curb global warming at a time when the planet is actually cooling rings downright obscene.
And that’s why last week’s cavalcade of Senators opposing the Act -- which would have directed the EPA to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases -- entirely on economic grounds was so confounding.
Don't get me wrong -- the fiscal arguments against the bill's draconian business regulations were inexorable -- its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation. An April EPA analysis of the bill estimated a 53 cents per gallon increase in the price of gasoline and a 44% jump in electricity costs by 2030 should it become law. Even those figures precariously assumed a 150% increase in nuclear and "significant use of biomass" for electricity generation; otherwise costs will be "significantly higher." Add a projected net loss of almost a trillion dollars in GDP by that very same year and this blatantly socialistic power-grab attempt deserved the pauper's funeral it received on financial grounds alone.
That's without even considering that there's no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction.
With Americans struggling to keep food on the table in lighted rooms of solvent homes as soaring energy costs drive prices painfully northward across the board, a bill that would hemorrhage thousands of additional dollars from each family's survival-chest annually would seem inopportune at best. Indeed, this public display of politicians debating climate science in terms of macroeconomics, while betraying a comprehension of neither by a disturbing majority within their ranks, was a wonder to behold in these truly trying times.
Green dreams were peddled. Imagine the insolence of countering the economic-suicide predicted from arbitrary and inherently unmonitorable CO2 limits with unfounded promises of some imaginary "green job" boom. Or basing short-term impact projections on the advent of renewable energy "technological advances," naively citing alternately the Apollo Mission and Manhattan Project as prognosticators of success's inevitability. And amid all these fantasies, legislating likewise non-existent Carbon capture and sequestration technology shackles upon the only energy source realistically capable of providing the nation's electricity for decades to come: Coal.
Particularly given no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction.
It's no secret how much liberals covet European models for just about everything. Yet, Europe's even less intrusive attempts at cap-and-trade have failed miserably, wreaking havoc upon economies with no significant decrease in atmospheric carbon levels. Britain's efforts to legislate carbon limits have sparked trucker and taxi-driver strikes and protests and even threaten Labor's majority. In fact, climate legislation across the pond has failed so miserably that a new poll found "more than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change."
Yet, despite all the consumer misery endured, CO2 levels in Great Britain still increased by 3.39% between Kyoto ratification in 1997 and 2004. True, the global average was 18.05%, but the United States, whose refusal to ratify allowed continued economic growth, managed a mere 6.57% increase. Compare that to other Kyoto signers like Japan (10.61%), Russia (15.61%) or Italy (15.53%). In fact, lib-beloved France, with all its Carbon pontification, barely beat the US (6.21%), despite deriving the majority of its electricity from carbon-neutral nuclear plants.
S.3036 ostensibly gambled on non-existent technology to accomplish essentially nothing at inescapably catastrophic costs.
The Silence of the Shams
GOP failure to challenge the act's underlying premise of man's influence on climate not only circumvented the strongest case against it, but also set perilous precedent by implying acceptance of the unaccepted in the halls of congress. Such oblique capitulation throughout the MSM, the leftie blogosphere and pop culture has already handed the alarmists a victory of sorts. And a Senate floor debate tacitly based upon the junk which is the Democrats' science can only serve to further dye the fraudulent claim of "consensus" into the ever docile fabric of public psyche.
Consequently, from the outset of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 debate, the greenie claim that the global warming "debate has ended" appeared as though a foregone conclusion. And everyone from Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to John Warner (R-VA) to Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was thus handed the pulpit from which to preach that we have no choice but to act now regardless of the economic fallout involved -- to do otherwise would be downright immoral.
During last week's Democrat radio address Boxer waxed Goraclesque:
"There are some in the Senate who insist that global warming is nothing more than science fiction. These are the same kind of voices who said that the world was flat, cigarettes were safe, cars didn't need air bags -- long after the rest of us knew the truth."
And with this shifty alarmist sleight-of-tongue (intentionally omitting the "anthropogenic" prefix), the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works chair set the tone for debate. Not whether or not mankind's Carbon footprint stinks, but rather what steps are necessary to assuage its feculence.
A June 2nd piece at WaPo lamenting the Senate's probable failure to pass S.3036 (for now) further exemplified the left's disregard for the science by stating that:
"The world has clamored for U.S. leadership on climate change. Yet for seven years the Bush administration denied and dithered while the planet warmed." [emphasis added]
An interesting accusation, particularly considering that the planet stopped warming 2 years before Bush took the oath in 2001, has been cooling since 2002 and that this year's was the fourth coldest May since 1979.
That's right -- the University of Alabama, Huntsville just published its satellite-derived temperature anomalies for May. The figures depict a global temperature drop of 0.195°C between April and May, and a drop of 0.379°C since May of last year. Anthony Watts, one of myriad scientists attributing recent cooling (and global temperature anomalies overall) to the activity of that yellow dwarf star at the center of our solar system and other historically correlative natural forces, notes that: [emphasis in original]
"Even more impressive is the change since the last big peak in global temperature in January 2007 at 0.594°C, giving a 16 month ∆T of -0.774°C which is equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon ‘global warming signal' of the last 100 years."
Please consider those words carefully.
And also that, as previously noted, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently confirmed that an impending phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years.
So amid all the dreadful economics, the Democrats were actually proposing the single largest government intrusion into the nation's economy since WWII rationing in order to stop something that stopped almost 10 years ago. And which, despite continually rising atmospheric CO2 levels, exhibits no signs of restarting.
A socialistic solution in search of a problem if ever there were one.
Das Klima Kapital
Have I mentioned that there's no proof whatever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction?
In last Tuesday's NRO, Lawrence Solomon reminded us that Lieberman-Warner is based primarily upon the premise that there exists "scientific consensus on [manmade] global warming." And that this over-talked talking point is based largely upon the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's headline of "2500 Scientific Expert Reviewers."
Even if true, why then does Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's petition against global warming alarmism continue to add signatures to its over 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with PhDs? Just who are the UN's "expert reviewers" whose opinions have been elevated to the realm of "indisputable?"
Solomon contacted the Secretariat of the IPCC to learn the names of these 2,500 scientists and just what exactly they endorsed. Writes Solomon:
"I planned to canvas them to determine their precise views. The answer that came back from the Secretariat informed me that the names were not public, so I would not be able to survey them, and that the scientists were merely reviewers. The 2,500 had not endorsed the conclusions of the report and, in fact, the IPCC had not claimed that they did. Journalists had jumped to the conclusion that the scientists the IPCC had touted were endorsers and the IPCC never saw fit to correct the record. There is no consensus of 2,500 scientist-endorsers. Moreover, many of those 2,500 reviewers turned thumbs down on the studies that they reviewed - I know this from my own interviews with them, conducted in the course of writing a book about scientists who dispute the conventional wisdom on climate change."
So why champion a bill that gambled on non-existent technology to accomplish essentially nothing at inescapably catastrophic costs to solve a non-problem that no one has the slightest idea how to solve anyway?
Addressing the National Press Club last month, Czech President Vaclav Klaus described the government control over business afforded by cap-and-trade as "something which resembles very much the dreams of communist central planners." And while Lieberman-Warner, which would have extracted trillions of dollars from the economy by selling greenhouse gas credits to American industry, already fit that bill, the so-called Boxer Substitute Amendment would bring a smile to the face of comrade Marx himself. Responding to claims that cap-and-trade would harm poorest Americans the most, Boxer's was a typical liberal fix that "sets aside a nearly $800 billion tax relief fund through 2050, which will help consumers in need of assistance related to energy costs."
Translation - control the nation's commerce while redistributing its profits.
In 1867, Karl Marx argued that capitalism's cycle of labor exploitation could not endlessly sustain itself and would ultimately be its doom. Modern greenies insist that capitalism's cycle of environmental exploitation will not endlessly sustain itself and will ultimately be not only its doom - but the entire planet's.
Cap-and-trade thus represents the perfect liberal synergy of environmentalism and socialism.
With both energy costs and atmospheric carbon levels on the rise while global temperatures fall, one might expect prudent policymakers to adopt a watch-and-wait philosophy over the next 10 years or so. But the envirosocialists are instead feeling the heat to enact their green-red social reforms before the "consensus" lie is exposed -- and the public's hypochondriacal fever cools.
All the more reason why Republican senators should have scooped up handfuls of nascent practical science and with it buried the decaying piles of junk science that shelter the counterfeit arguments coming from the other side of the aisle. And Friday's defeat of S.3036 doesn't change that imperative one iota.
Yes, having failed to muster the 60 votes (48-36) necessary to overcome a GOP filibuster and move to final consideration, Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to pull the bill from the floor. But with both Presidential nominees supporting cap-and-trade and likely Democrat gains in both houses, this insidious scheme may smell funny, but it's by no means dead. Especially with a majority of the citizenry reading headlines the likes of Republican lawmakers block US climate bill still of the mind that their carbon-spewing lifestyles somehow threaten the world of their descendancy.
So when next the battle wages, government topography, public hysteria and lower energy costs might coalesce to favor the alarmists' scare tactics over the economic realities.
That's why then -- as now and before - disputing and debunking the sham science will be key to curing this greenhouse gas dementia once and for all.
Marc Sheppard is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
Egg and bacon bush, coastal area, Sydney, Australia.
With debt of a magnitude few of us can readily conceive, with trade deficits of enormous proportions, with a gutted manufacturing sector and the ruthless reduction of the community of skilled factory workers, with a corporate culture that has lost its traditional dedication to real investment, productivity and production in favour of "ownership" and speculative enterprise, the United States appears to be moving rapidly along the road to ruin. The most forbidding of economic crises - with a variety of themes, aspects and complexities - seems to threaten just a short distance down that road from where we are now. If and when it arrives, a turmoil and misery to put the Great Depression of the 1930s to shame could afflict the American economy and the American people - and persist perhaps for a decade or more.
James Cumes, America's Suicidal State Craft.
And collapsed, and seen for the future, old fashioned socialists running the country, his own darkness and dysfunction long forgotten as a bunch of snivelling self-serving idiots ran the country into the ground. More tax, yet more and more tax. Not only did they sell the farm, they obliterated what was left of the economy. Australia became a country that didn't make anything, that didn't have a normal manufacturing base, that had been led by fools and dissed for the toss, the population taken for fools. Oh no, don't let this happen, ancient souls cried, but it was too late, it was already happening.
Kevin Rudd has been to the socialist citadel, the United Nations, gave a speech which made him look like a high school debating leader struggling with difficult concepts, accepted the applause which was not his due, entered the limousine he had not paid for, ate food supplied by the Australian taxpayer, and took us all for a ride. It was the contempt for the common man that got him. None of these people had worked a real day in their lives. They all wore white ribbons the other day in parliament, queuing up to get on the band wagon and show that they were against domestic violence, that all men were patriarchal brutes, that government statistics showing men are twice as likely to be the victims of violence as women are irrelevant in the face of blind feminist ideology, and peddling more lies as they swim in a soup of self-congratulatory nonsense.
It's sick making, the lot of it. Nothing works. We spend half the day trapped on the M5, and get charged a toll for the privilege. We are shattered and the darkness of a decaying culture wreaks havoc on the land. Oh how could you, how could you, but the Spanish passed laws making it illegal to encourage a woman in a traditional role, given time the Australian government will do the same, when they think of it, and that bustling matriarch he saw that special day, happy, busy, surrounded by children and grandchildren, will become technically illegal. My own grandmothers, who each bought up six kids during the Depression, would likewise become illegal. And all was lost, lost, as the plutocrats and bureaucrats take over, destroying our lives.
They suck every last cent off the populace and wonder why the nation is sinking into despair. Mortgage stress has become the living norm in Western Sydney, and dark days were eating away at the cosy world he was trying to create. He slept like a log, while the cute boy in Pye said something similar, I've got to go and lay a log. Do you mind? Some things I don't need to know. Healthy, happy, in their prime, the flashes of youth were everywhere as a new generation pushed into prominence, unable to imagine the past, unable to think, even superficially, of what was happening and what was about to happen. He needed to go bush. He needed to escape. He was sure there were shadows on the skirting of time, he sought to avoid the consequence.
The financial meltdown in America has made everyone nervous. Australia is protected, Australia is in good shape, Treasurer Wayne Swan declares in blustering, unconvincing tones. It's obvious to almost everyone he has no idea what he is talking about, winging it desperately. Nobody has any money any more. Every move has a cost, GST, parking fines, speeding fines, highway tolls. Rents escalate. The spirits from the 30s, the working class spirits on which the nation was based, are sitting on spectral fences, crowing, warning, watching. There are ways to survive all this. Destroy yourselves, destroy your own prosperity, destroy the economy, and we will all be bombed back to the dark ages.
Spectral in their lunacy, the ghosts of beggars and unemployed men, the tramps who walked the country looking for work, all they sought was the decency of labour and the comfort of a full belly, while the self congratulatory socialists, abusive to their core, swanned around in their government limousines and government jets, Rudd listing his points, one, two, three, asking himself questions, explaining, explaining, over-exposed, his massive ego needing to be constantly fed. He's still standing up in the polls, amazingly, the population is slow to forgive the conservatives their sins, their own socialist welfare policies, their own big taxing ways. The old saying: they're each as bad as the other, came true. There is nowhere to turn. No one in power has a shed of decency. They are all compromised, all dishonest, all divorced from a day's work for a day's pay; and in the end we will all pay for their preening self-aggrandisement, their self-serving flattering, their perpetual lies. Have you no heart, no conscience, no perception? Apparently not.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
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Phil Chapman | April 23, 2008
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.
For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.
We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.
We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.
The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.
All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.
It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.
In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."
Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
Congress Fiddled With Warming While Earth Cooled
By Marc Sheppard
Last week Democrats tried to kill the economy in the name of solving a problem that doesn't exist. Republicans should hang this bill around their necks in every district where an incumbent voted for the woefully misnamed and deservedly DOA Climate Security Act, technically S.3036.
Asking Americans to pony up even more at the pump with already record gasoline prices creeping higher almost daily seems offensive enough. But compelling such burden under the guise of moral imperative to curb global warming at a time when the planet is actually cooling rings downright obscene.
And that’s why last week’s cavalcade of Senators opposing the Act -- which would have directed the EPA to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases -- entirely on economic grounds was so confounding.
Don't get me wrong -- the fiscal arguments against the bill's draconian business regulations were inexorable -- its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation. An April EPA analysis of the bill estimated a 53 cents per gallon increase in the price of gasoline and a 44% jump in electricity costs by 2030 should it become law. Even those figures precariously assumed a 150% increase in nuclear and "significant use of biomass" for electricity generation; otherwise costs will be "significantly higher." Add a projected net loss of almost a trillion dollars in GDP by that very same year and this blatantly socialistic power-grab attempt deserved the pauper's funeral it received on financial grounds alone.
That's without even considering that there's no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction.
With Americans struggling to keep food on the table in lighted rooms of solvent homes as soaring energy costs drive prices painfully northward across the board, a bill that would hemorrhage thousands of additional dollars from each family's survival-chest annually would seem inopportune at best. Indeed, this public display of politicians debating climate science in terms of macroeconomics, while betraying a comprehension of neither by a disturbing majority within their ranks, was a wonder to behold in these truly trying times.
Green dreams were peddled. Imagine the insolence of countering the economic-suicide predicted from arbitrary and inherently unmonitorable CO2 limits with unfounded promises of some imaginary "green job" boom. Or basing short-term impact projections on the advent of renewable energy "technological advances," naively citing alternately the Apollo Mission and Manhattan Project as prognosticators of success's inevitability. And amid all these fantasies, legislating likewise non-existent Carbon capture and sequestration technology shackles upon the only energy source realistically capable of providing the nation's electricity for decades to come: Coal.
Particularly given no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction.
It's no secret how much liberals covet European models for just about everything. Yet, Europe's even less intrusive attempts at cap-and-trade have failed miserably, wreaking havoc upon economies with no significant decrease in atmospheric carbon levels. Britain's efforts to legislate carbon limits have sparked trucker and taxi-driver strikes and protests and even threaten Labor's majority. In fact, climate legislation across the pond has failed so miserably that a new poll found "more than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change."
Yet, despite all the consumer misery endured, CO2 levels in Great Britain still increased by 3.39% between Kyoto ratification in 1997 and 2004. True, the global average was 18.05%, but the United States, whose refusal to ratify allowed continued economic growth, managed a mere 6.57% increase. Compare that to other Kyoto signers like Japan (10.61%), Russia (15.61%) or Italy (15.53%). In fact, lib-beloved France, with all its Carbon pontification, barely beat the US (6.21%), despite deriving the majority of its electricity from carbon-neutral nuclear plants.
S.3036 ostensibly gambled on non-existent technology to accomplish essentially nothing at inescapably catastrophic costs.
The Silence of the Shams
GOP failure to challenge the act's underlying premise of man's influence on climate not only circumvented the strongest case against it, but also set perilous precedent by implying acceptance of the unaccepted in the halls of congress. Such oblique capitulation throughout the MSM, the leftie blogosphere and pop culture has already handed the alarmists a victory of sorts. And a Senate floor debate tacitly based upon the junk which is the Democrats' science can only serve to further dye the fraudulent claim of "consensus" into the ever docile fabric of public psyche.
Consequently, from the outset of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 debate, the greenie claim that the global warming "debate has ended" appeared as though a foregone conclusion. And everyone from Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to John Warner (R-VA) to Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was thus handed the pulpit from which to preach that we have no choice but to act now regardless of the economic fallout involved -- to do otherwise would be downright immoral.
During last week's Democrat radio address Boxer waxed Goraclesque:
"There are some in the Senate who insist that global warming is nothing more than science fiction. These are the same kind of voices who said that the world was flat, cigarettes were safe, cars didn't need air bags -- long after the rest of us knew the truth."
And with this shifty alarmist sleight-of-tongue (intentionally omitting the "anthropogenic" prefix), the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works chair set the tone for debate. Not whether or not mankind's Carbon footprint stinks, but rather what steps are necessary to assuage its feculence.
A June 2nd piece at WaPo lamenting the Senate's probable failure to pass S.3036 (for now) further exemplified the left's disregard for the science by stating that:
"The world has clamored for U.S. leadership on climate change. Yet for seven years the Bush administration denied and dithered while the planet warmed." [emphasis added]
An interesting accusation, particularly considering that the planet stopped warming 2 years before Bush took the oath in 2001, has been cooling since 2002 and that this year's was the fourth coldest May since 1979.
That's right -- the University of Alabama, Huntsville just published its satellite-derived temperature anomalies for May. The figures depict a global temperature drop of 0.195°C between April and May, and a drop of 0.379°C since May of last year. Anthony Watts, one of myriad scientists attributing recent cooling (and global temperature anomalies overall) to the activity of that yellow dwarf star at the center of our solar system and other historically correlative natural forces, notes that: [emphasis in original]
"Even more impressive is the change since the last big peak in global temperature in January 2007 at 0.594°C, giving a 16 month ∆T of -0.774°C which is equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon ‘global warming signal' of the last 100 years."
Please consider those words carefully.
And also that, as previously noted, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently confirmed that an impending phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years.
So amid all the dreadful economics, the Democrats were actually proposing the single largest government intrusion into the nation's economy since WWII rationing in order to stop something that stopped almost 10 years ago. And which, despite continually rising atmospheric CO2 levels, exhibits no signs of restarting.
A socialistic solution in search of a problem if ever there were one.
Das Klima Kapital
Have I mentioned that there's no proof whatever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction?
In last Tuesday's NRO, Lawrence Solomon reminded us that Lieberman-Warner is based primarily upon the premise that there exists "scientific consensus on [manmade] global warming." And that this over-talked talking point is based largely upon the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's headline of "2500 Scientific Expert Reviewers."
Even if true, why then does Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's petition against global warming alarmism continue to add signatures to its over 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with PhDs? Just who are the UN's "expert reviewers" whose opinions have been elevated to the realm of "indisputable?"
Solomon contacted the Secretariat of the IPCC to learn the names of these 2,500 scientists and just what exactly they endorsed. Writes Solomon:
"I planned to canvas them to determine their precise views. The answer that came back from the Secretariat informed me that the names were not public, so I would not be able to survey them, and that the scientists were merely reviewers. The 2,500 had not endorsed the conclusions of the report and, in fact, the IPCC had not claimed that they did. Journalists had jumped to the conclusion that the scientists the IPCC had touted were endorsers and the IPCC never saw fit to correct the record. There is no consensus of 2,500 scientist-endorsers. Moreover, many of those 2,500 reviewers turned thumbs down on the studies that they reviewed - I know this from my own interviews with them, conducted in the course of writing a book about scientists who dispute the conventional wisdom on climate change."
So why champion a bill that gambled on non-existent technology to accomplish essentially nothing at inescapably catastrophic costs to solve a non-problem that no one has the slightest idea how to solve anyway?
Addressing the National Press Club last month, Czech President Vaclav Klaus described the government control over business afforded by cap-and-trade as "something which resembles very much the dreams of communist central planners." And while Lieberman-Warner, which would have extracted trillions of dollars from the economy by selling greenhouse gas credits to American industry, already fit that bill, the so-called Boxer Substitute Amendment would bring a smile to the face of comrade Marx himself. Responding to claims that cap-and-trade would harm poorest Americans the most, Boxer's was a typical liberal fix that "sets aside a nearly $800 billion tax relief fund through 2050, which will help consumers in need of assistance related to energy costs."
Translation - control the nation's commerce while redistributing its profits.
In 1867, Karl Marx argued that capitalism's cycle of labor exploitation could not endlessly sustain itself and would ultimately be its doom. Modern greenies insist that capitalism's cycle of environmental exploitation will not endlessly sustain itself and will ultimately be not only its doom - but the entire planet's.
Cap-and-trade thus represents the perfect liberal synergy of environmentalism and socialism.
With both energy costs and atmospheric carbon levels on the rise while global temperatures fall, one might expect prudent policymakers to adopt a watch-and-wait philosophy over the next 10 years or so. But the envirosocialists are instead feeling the heat to enact their green-red social reforms before the "consensus" lie is exposed -- and the public's hypochondriacal fever cools.
All the more reason why Republican senators should have scooped up handfuls of nascent practical science and with it buried the decaying piles of junk science that shelter the counterfeit arguments coming from the other side of the aisle. And Friday's defeat of S.3036 doesn't change that imperative one iota.
Yes, having failed to muster the 60 votes (48-36) necessary to overcome a GOP filibuster and move to final consideration, Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to pull the bill from the floor. But with both Presidential nominees supporting cap-and-trade and likely Democrat gains in both houses, this insidious scheme may smell funny, but it's by no means dead. Especially with a majority of the citizenry reading headlines the likes of Republican lawmakers block US climate bill still of the mind that their carbon-spewing lifestyles somehow threaten the world of their descendancy.
So when next the battle wages, government topography, public hysteria and lower energy costs might coalesce to favor the alarmists' scare tactics over the economic realities.
That's why then -- as now and before - disputing and debunking the sham science will be key to curing this greenhouse gas dementia once and for all.
Marc Sheppard is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
Egg and bacon bush, coastal area, Sydney, Australia.
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