Global warming? . . . Or cooling?

Interesting: Shortly after hearing of the supposed "failure" of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I happened to come across an article in the Economist's special The World in 2010 called "Where have all the sunspots gone?"

"In the past, sunspots have disappeared for decades," writes the author.

Between 1645 and 1715, they were rare. There were several years in which none at all was sighted and others in which fewer than ten were spotted. Giovanni Cassini, an Italian astronomer, described a sunspot that appeared in 1671 as the first he had seen for many years. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, observed one in 1684, after a gap of ten years. This 70-year period of low solar activity has since been dubbed the Maunder Minimum (after an astronomer called Edward Maunder, a sunspot specialist).

And so? . . .

Well, it appears we may be entering into a new "Maunder Minimum."

Four centuries after sunspots were first seen—by Galileo—they have disappeared almost entirely. In 2009 weeks and sometimes months went by without a single sunspot being discerned. In 2010 they will return, or so say most solar scientists. Others wonder whether the sun may be going through an extended period of inactivity. . . .

Normally the number of sunspots peaks every 11 years, coinciding with the times when the sun’s magnetic field is at its strongest. As the field wanes, the number of sunspots falls to a trough or minimum, at which point the sun’s magnetic field reverses direction and starts to regain its strength. As it does so, sunspots begin to appear close to the poles of the sun. When the magnetic field is at its strongest, and sunspots at their most plentiful, they cluster close to the equator.

Back in 2008 solar scientists saw a high-latitude, reversed-polarity sunspot, suggesting the start of a new solar cycle. Since then, however, there has been little activity. . . .

Scientists from America’s space agency, NASA, reckon that the next peak will come in March or April 2013. However, their colleagues at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, have found that the magnetism of sunspots (the strength of the knot that they form) has been declining over the past couple of decades. If this carries on, solar magnetic fields will become too weak to form sunspots, which will vanish completely in 2015.

So are we headed for a new "Maunder Minimum"? We may find out in 2010.
"Reliable predictions of sunspot numbers are impossible to make until the solar cycle is well established, usually three years after the minimum"--i.e., this year, 2010.

But so what? And why did I title this post with words about global warming or cooling?

Well . . .

"The Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of exceptionally cold winters in Europe and North America and, perhaps, elsewhere," writes the author.

"Oh, yes!" I thought when I read that sentence. "Wasn't that called the Little Ice Age?" (Yes, it was.)

Frankly, I have been a skeptic not so much about global warming, per se, but about the supposed link between human action and global warming. Considering the temperature increases that occurred long before the build-up in atmospheric carbon dioxide; and considering the much higher temperatures the earth seems to have experienced in millennia past: I just don't find the "arguments" for human causation particularly compelling.

So then comes this article about sunspots.

"What happens if global warming meets solar cooling?" asks the author. "Expect a hot debate."

Yes. I can imagine.

But I just hope the cooling, if it is to come, comes quickly and decisively so that our governments will not have made it impossible for those of us who will need fuel just to stay warm and survive to get the fuel we need.

******
While we're on the subject, let me encourage you to read physicist Howard Hayden's "one-letter proof" that the science is not settled on the issue of CO2 and climate change.

Nice job, Professor Hayden (and Stephan Kinsella, who quoted him).

******
Oh. And then yesterday I happened upon this article, from yesterday's Daily Mail (UK), in which "some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists" claim that "a global trend towards cooler weather . . . is likely to last for 20 or 30 years."

Interesting: These scientists don't mention sunspots. They refer to certain "oceanic cycles, . . . known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs)."

Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

‘They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.
In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

Of course, the "orthodox" global warming advocates claim all of this is preposterous.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

Will the die-hard believers allow us to wait two or three years to see?

Somehow, I think not. They will attempt, with all their might, to push the rest of us into their orthodoxy.

And I? I would prefer to advocate for a little room to let global warming "heretics" have their say without persecution.

[NOTE: If you are reading this article on Facebook, it originally appeared on my personal blog.]

For the lack of an editor . . .

One thing



. . . leads to



. . . another



. . . and this morning I bump into a page on the Discovery Channel website



that says HDTVs are speeding up climate change due to the Nitrogen Trifluoride used in their production:

According to University of California researchers, the gas flat-panel displays exhaust is 17,200 worse for the planet than carbon dioxide.

That's because the gas in question - Nitrogen Trifluoride (NF3) - is 17,200 better at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a hundred-year period than the much-maligned and best-known greenhouse gas, CO2.

Well, the lack of a unit of measure for that number--17,200--made me pause. Did the author mean 17,200 TIMES or 17,200 PERCENT? There's a 10,000 percent (or 100 times) difference between those two units!

As it turned out, the author offered readers a clue later on:

Today, researchers say production of NF3 has reached 4,000 tonnes a year. If this year's entire output was released into the atmosphere, it would have a warming effect equivalent to 67 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

I posted a comment on the page:

Where's the editor for this article? "17,200 worse" doesn't make sense! Is that "17,200 TIMES worse"? "17,200 PERCENT worse"? . . . I guess I can calculate it. 67,000,000/4,000 = 16,750. So the missing word is "times."

But it is too bad no editor was there to catch the grammatical error (repeated twice) that left out the vital word.

On the other hand, then, too, it would have been nice if the author and/or an editor would have done a FACT-check to determine if "16,750 times" is really the correct number (rather than the [apparently] "17,200 times" reported), or whether the idea that 4,000 tonnes of NF3 produces the same warming effect as 67 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is really accurate.

I wonder where that 17,200 number really came from? And why it doesn't match the 67 million tonnes/4,000 tonnes comparison?

I'll be curious to see how Discovery Channel handles my query and comment. Are they going to quietly correct the error(s) and leave my comment unpublished? Or . . . ???

Gotta be careful

I want to be sure I don't misrepresent the story about Greenland. It's not as if Greenland was a temperate oasis in the middle ages--any more than that Iceland was an arctic deep-freezer when it was named only a few years before.

Unlike the gentleman who suggests Greenland got its name due to its supposedly mild climate, no reputable historian I have read has ever suggested Eric the Red named it as he did in order accurately to communicate its beauty. Rather, the name itself was a kind of marketing ruse.

However, the fact that Greenland was never as idyllic as the name might imply doesn't mean, either, that it suffered anywhere near as rocky, barren or brutal a climate as it has in the more recent past.

I found descriptions of some of the solid, archeological evidence for a milder climate in an excellent article called The Fate of Greenland's Vikings by Dale Mackenzie Brown.

According to Brown, when archeologists have dug down in the right places, beneath "the permafrost and . . . windblown glacial sand," they have found the remains of a once-thriving European-founded colony in which people lived in stone-and-turf houses, and established dairy and sheep farms. The farms, apparently, were rather prosperous. Indeed, so prosperous that, in the middle of the 12th century, the community sent an emissary to get them a bishop for their church.

The emissary was successful. However,

By the middle of the fourteenth century, [the Church] owned two-thirds of the island's finest pastures, and tithes remained as onerous as ever, some of the proceeds going to the support of the Crusades half way around the world and even to fight heretics in Italy. Church authorities, however, found it increasingly difficult to get bishops to come to the distant island. Several clerics took the title, but never actually went there, preferring to bestow their blessings from afar.

Life went sour for the Greenlanders in other ways. The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. . . .

As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland, exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Erosion followed severe reductions in ground cover. The cutting of dwarf willows and alders for fuel . . . deprived the soil of its anchor of roots. Pollen analysis shows a dramatic decline in these species during the Viking years. In addition, livestock probably consumed any regenerating scrub. Overgrazing, trampling, and scuffing by the Norsemen's sheep, goats and cattle, the core of the island's livelihood, left the land debased.

Greenland's climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. . . .

There is architectural evidence for the climate change:

Over the decades the drop in temperature seems to have had an effect on the design of the Greenlanders' houses. Originally conceived as single-roomed structures, like the great hall at Brattahlid, they were divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners might benefit from the animals' body heat.

There is also some organic evidence:

Study of the farms' ancient insect fauna revealed the remains of flies. Brought inadvertently from Europe, the flies were dependent for their survival on the warm environment of the Norse houses and on the less than sanitary state of the interiors. Radiocarbon dating of their remains revealed that they died out suddenly when these conditions ceased to prevail around 1350, presumably when the structures were no longer inhabited. . . . An ice core drilled from the island's massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.

*****
By the way. I have found an interesting article that suggests Greenland's ice cap is far more stable than some of the more hysterical reports suggest.
*****
And one last comment.

Am I a "global warming denier" (perhaps morally equivalent to a Holocaust denier)? No. I think the data shows there has been some kind of average global warming in the recent past. My questions, however, include these:

• Is this warming trend unprecedented in global history? (Evidence demonstrates: Absolutely not. "[S]omewhere between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, the world's largest island had a climate much like that of Northern New England, the researchers said. Butterflies fluttered over lush meadows interspersed with stands of pine, spruce, and alder. . . . Greenland really was green, before Ice Age glaciers enshrouded vast swaths of the Northern Hemisphere.")


• Is the current warming catastrophic? (My sense: probably not. If the earth and its flora and fauna survived the heat of times past, it--and they, and we--ought, certainly, to be able to survive the heat of the future.)


• Does it promise to be catastrophic "if we don't do anything"? (See above . . . and below.)


• Can human beings really do anything to reverse the warming? (My sense: there is little that we can do to reverse the warming. What we can do is carefully observe the climate trends and make appropriate changes in land use as the trends take their courses.
  
  As "The Reckless Libertine" comments in response to the article I linked to above with the "hysterical" epithet:
  

  The sea levels ARE going to rise. This much is inevitable. You can argue all you like about the impact man is having, and I don't doubt that there is an impact, but even if we all went back to live in the trees the sea level would still rise.
  
  How do I know this? Simple - it's been steadily falling for most of the past 1500 years (at least). We are told how the melting of the Greenland icecap is a terrible certainty, and what horrors we have wrought by allowing this to happen - yet in 1424, the Chinese explorer Hang Wen circumnavigated the island. At that time, there was no icecap - it's grown up since then (indeed, the last ice age peaked, not ten thousand years ago, but at the beginning of the 18th century).
  
  You can travel all around Britain's coastline and find all manner of evidence of land that was once underwater. Harlech in Gwynedd has always seemed an ideal example to me; here is a castle which was finished in 1299, and had it's own dock and sewage outlet at the rear of the castle. Today, the castle stands some 4 or 5 miles from the sea.
  
  Obviously, the sea level was not going to keep dropping forever. In fact, we have further evidence of such rise and fall in the past in the migration - on foot - of peoples from Siberia to Alaska, or from Orkney to mainland Scotland.
  
  This is an inescapable process. Like it or not, the water levels are going to rise (albeit very slowly) no matter how you spend your money.

Becoming angrier about the climate fear-mongers

Like too many subjects I deal with, it seems a lot of our culture-shapers (i.e., journalists) simply spout the "received wisdom" rather than truly seeking to discover what "the other side" has to say.

And so it was this morning that I read the following in an e-newsletter I get each day (but read maybe once every couple of months on average):

-----Original Message-----

. . . The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS . . .

COAL KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON IN AMERICA – CAN WE MAKE IT CLEANER?
by Greg Guenthner

. . . coal would be sitting pretty. But the black rock is under attack from governments, scientists and ordinary citizens throughout the world. And with no end in sight, our main source of electricity is in serious jeopardy.

The prolific use of coal as a power generating fuel is causing massive damage to the planet in the form of carbon dioxide emissions. This is not a political statement – it’s been proven over and over again by scientists and accepted by governments and the United Nations.

Today, oil we burn in our vehicles and use for power generation is the number one source of CO₂ emissions. . . .

I was tempted to respond to both egregious errors in this brief section of Guenthner's article (about the supposed "massive damage" caused by carbon dioxide emissions and the supposed truth that human beings and our energy requirements are, somehow, "the number one source of CO₂ emissions"). But I held my tongue. I only wrote about the first matter.

Friends:

I wish Greg Guenthner might have done--or might yet do--some better research about the supposed "proof" for "massive damage to the planet in the form of carbon dioxide emissions" and concerning the supposed "massive damage" itself.

I invite you--and Mr. Guenthner--to read What is the "Hockey Stick" Debate About?, just about anything on the Climate Audit blog by Steve McIntyre, and “the take-home messages” at the end of The Real ‘Inconvenient Truth.’

I would have hoped Agora Publishing and The Daily Reckoning would be more attentive to exposing fraud rather than perpetrating it!

Sincerely,

John Holzmann

How "real" science is being done today

Want to know the grounds for the multi-trillion-dollar proposals before the U.S. congress and other world government bodies? (I refer, of course, to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 and the International Energy Agency's call for a $45 trillion investment in "clean technology.")

The scientific grounds for these proposals are . . . absolutely mind-blowing, to put it mildly.

If you've never been to ClimateAudit.org before, I recommend you check it out. The site's owner and primary author, Steve McIntyre is deeply concerned about the matter of scientific credibility. For good reason.

Mr. McIntyre is trained and experienced in uncovering fraud in mining company investment offerings. (A company that owns a gold mine, for example, may claim it has 25 million tons of proven, high-grade, gold-bearing ore in a certain mine. Mr. McIntyre's job is to look at the data and determine whether the company's claim is valid or not.)

Using the same bullheaded search for truth in the "global climate change" debate, Mr. McIntyre has been discovering that the leading spokespeople for the kind of hysteria that seems to rule the day . . . --these people seem, regularly, to ignore the rules of thoroughgoing scientific research: they cherry-pick their data, "forget" to document their work, refuse to permit fully independent inquiry into their data and methodology, and, overall, make it as difficult as possible for anyone but themselves--the alarmist masters--to evaluate their work.

For one minor example of this phenomenon, take McIntyre's May 11, 2006, post for example, in which he questions the dendroclimatological studies [tree-ring based studies of climate change over time] of a supposed "leader" in the field, one J. Esper.

McIntyre reveals something Esper conveniently never mentioned in a major peer-reviewed paper he had published in Science magazine: Esper had collected a lot more data than he reported on.

So McIntyre asked Esper

two . . . methodological questions - one that I’ve been asking for a while: how he operationally allocates tree populations into “linear” and “nonlinear” trees . . . [and how] he decide[d] which trees to use and which trees not to use.

Here, verbatim, is the second (and, for my purposes in this post, most pertinent) question that McIntyre put to Esper via Science:

In 4 cases (Athabaska, Jaemtland, Quebec, Zhaschiviersk), Esper’s site chronology says that not all of the data in the data set is used. This is not mentioned in the original article. What is the basis for de-selection of individual cores?

This is Esper’s "non-responsive answer" as quoted by McIntyre:

As described, in some of the sites we did not use all data. We did not remove single measurements, but clusters of series that had either significantly differing growth rates or differing age-related shapes, indicating that these trees represent a different population, and that combining these data in a single RCS run will result in a biased chronology. By the way, we excluded other sites because growth was too rapid, for example.

"First, consider Esper’s statement," McIntyre pleads:

“As described, in some of the sites we did not use all data.” I challenge anyone to locate any “description” or even hint in the four corners of Esper et al 2002 that they did not use all the data, let alone any reason for why they did not use all the data. There is no “description” or even hint in Esper et al 2002 [the original article] that all the data was not used. The admission came only in response to my parsing through data that took nearly two years to get.

Esper now says that cores were de-selected to avoid a “biased chronology” and cited Esper et al 2003 as a suppposed authority for the procedure. However an examination of Esper et al 2003 provides no such authority. In fact, the closest thing in Esper et al 2003 to such a statement is the following, which I’ve quoted before:

Before venturing into the subject of sample depth and chronology quality, we state from the beginning, “more is always better”. However as we mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology.

Here Esper is talking about removing data to “enhance a desired signal”. Excuse me - that doesn’t sound like a way of avoiding a “biased chronology”; it sounds like a recipe for making biased chronologies - biased towards a “desired signal.”

What do you think?

*******

For some fundamental understanding of what McIntyre is up against, see Kyoto protocol based on flawed statistics, The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate Index: Update and Implications and/or Backgrounder for McIntyre and McKitrick “Hockey Stick Project”.