A very different perspective on various subjects . . .

Very rarely are we permitted to listen to alternative perspectives on matters of deep importance. I was reminded of that again last night when I received an email from John Tate, campaign manager for Ron Paul:

90 seconds.

That's how much of the first hour of tonight's GOP debate was given to Ron Paul. 90 measly seconds out of 3,600 seconds.

The remaining 3,510 seconds were spent with the other major candidates:

** Declaring their desire to start wars in Iran, Pakistan, and Syria;

** Rehashing their support for torture;

** Agreeing that President Obama has the right to unilaterally assassinate an American citizen without a court conviction;

** Explaining their plans to continue nation-building, policing, and occupying countries across the globe.

It literally made me sick watching the mainstream media once again silence the one sane voice in this election. The one dissenter to a decade of unchecked war. The one candidate who stands for true defense and actual constitutional government.

Ron Paul was silenced, in perhaps the most important debate of the cycle.

You have to ask yourself why.

I think I know the answer. Both parties have perpetuated the foreign policy that is bankrupting our nation and tearing apart the world.

Both parties have started wars without proper congressional authorization.

Both parties have fabricated reasons for war.

Both parties’ outrageous spending has taken us to the brink of disaster.

And if the other candidates on the stage tonight are to be believed, then there is only one candidate who would break the globalists’ stranglehold over our foreign policy, our Treasury, and the lives of our family, friends, and neighbors in the armed forces.

Ron Paul could change history. He could save our great nation from its own devastating policies of the past 10 years.

If his voice could be heard.

The media has once again BLACKED OUT Ron Paul.

But I am reminded, too, of an article I read this past summer about The Filter Bubble or "invisible sieve" that may be, sadly, slowly wrapping itself around even those of us who want to hear "the other side" and understand why people think differently than we do. As Facebook, Google, and other internet search engines and information servers come to "understand" our own predilections, they begin feeding us an ever-more-specialized subset of all the material potentially available in the world. And thus, as Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, says, they begin "indoctrinating us with our own ideas," or "autopropagandizing."

I hope not. As one commentator replied to the article I just referenced,

People already [tend to] read the newspaper that reflects their biases; TV news - especially in the USA - is entertainment almost entirely devoid of content and highly country-centric. People socialize with others who resemble them. This has been true for over a century. But . . . I can, by selecting my search terms, browse for nearly everything I want. Even if I am a life-long pacifist, typing "Hitler" into the browser search bar will return information about his life and his impact on the world. Even if I am a middle-aged white male from Arkansas, typing "Moroccan lesbian" will return something outside my normal realm of experience. And - in a more factual example - I can subscribe to the online version of Al Jazeeera, browse Le Monde (if I'm willing to pay; if not I can always find excerpts and summaries) and cast a glance at... gasp... The Economist. So basically the concern about living in a bubble seems to me to be utterly fantastical. Bubble people will always live in their bubbles.

May the rest of us continue stolidly to seek to build bridges!

. . . And now, having said all that, I thought I would call your attention to a guy who obviously thinks very differently . . . and is willing to argue his points. He goes by the name Kaz and you can find him on his website called But Now You Know.

For example, Cash for Clunkers Causes Pollution and Poverty. Of course, the post is more than two years old. Kaz wrote what he did as the program was going into effect. But it is helpful to learn from history. Our government did authorize the program. And Kaz' analysis still makes sense. Some of the faults Kaz noted:

• Cash for Clunkers Pollutes
  

  This is because the older a car, the worse its gas mileage. Not only in general, but also because cars tend to perform worse as they age.
  
  Cash for Clunkers only rewards people for buying new cars, not for simply buying any car that got better gas mileage, regardless of its age. And it destroys the cars traded in, regardless of their own gas mileage.
  
  This means that only more-prosperous people, who can afford new cars, are able to use the C4C program. They are, therefore, often trading in relatively nice, fuel-efficient cars. Often, they are even buying cars only a couple of miles per gallon more efficient.
  
  Meanwhile, what about the people with older cars, which are much less fuel efficient?
  
  Simple: They are having the nicer, more efficient used cars they WOULD have bought destroyed. Leaving them in a pollutive car longer than if the C4C never happened in the first place.

  Kaz says more on the subject, but this gives the gist.
   
• . . . and Causes Poverty
  

  As the best-off consumers buy better things, items out of favor — whether used or just old models — become less expensive, allowing poorer people to buy progressively better stuff for the same prices.
  
  In the case of cash for clunkers, the Obama administration broke this:
  

  • Nice used cars will now be in shorter supply, which will raise the relative prices of the remaining nice used cars.
     
  • This will make it harder for poorer people to afford to upgrade.
     
  • This will trickle all the way down to the very poorest, who will soon find that their ability to buy some minimal car AT ALL, is affected.
     
  • That can mean the difference between getting to a job, and getting out of poverty, or being trapped indefinitely.

  So aside from the many other unintended consequences of this program, and there are many, the program has actually set the scene for poor people to have an even harder time affording cars, a vital tool for earning more money.

--A lot to think about, there. Then there was this about global warming (or cooling): There is most certainly a pattern to climate change . . . but it’s not what you may think: Climate Change Timeline – 1895-2009. And that led me to his notice about Our Fifth Year of Global Cooling: Coldest Since 1996. (What!?! --I hadn't heard about that.) Sadly, that post is almost two years old, now. So I looked to see if he had updated it since. It appears not. I found his post from 2009: 4th Year of Global Cooling, NOAA Says. Good data. Well worthy of your perusal. But I wondered if the trend has continued. And he has said nothing on the subject. However, I did find this article: October 2011 NOAA Data: U.S. Temperature Cooling Trend of 15 Years Continues, -3.7 Degrees. Yipes! As the author notes,

The per century cooling trend of this [15-year --JAH] period, a minus 3.7°F, took place despite the huge warmth produced by two large El Niño events during this 15-year span: 1997-1998 and 2009-2010. For the 10-year period ending October 2011 (November 1, 2001 thru October, 2011 - 120 months), the cooling trend accelerates to a very significant minus 10.6°F per century rate - again, per the updated NOAA/NCDC temperature records.

But as Kaz notes,

Because their budgets depend on scaring people with the global warming myth, various government organizations and bureaucrats have desperately been spinning this cooling trend, even as they avoid directly mentioning it. Around 2006, there started a growing trend to refer to it as “climate change”, not global WARMING, because they wanted to re-brand it before the cooling became well-known. Now, as the global cooling trend has continued for five years, you can actually find global warming profiteers saying as crazily anti-scientific things as “global warming will probably take a break for a while”, as if it were a tired old man, not a weather phenomenon.

He continues with a discussion of what he calls The Climate Bogeyman.

Now we’re all familiar with witch-hunt logic: We throw the unpopular woman in the lake:

• If she drowns, she was innocent.
   
• If she floats and survives, she’s a witch and we burn her at the stake.

This kind of evil trick has been used by people seeking power through fear, for as long as recorded history. It is one thing that Principles of Justice, and the Scientific Method, are supposed to counteract. Sadly, this appears to be the same logic that the global warming profiteers use. If the weather is warm, it’s proof of global warming, if it’s cold, it’s proof the weather has been disrupted by global warming. The scientific method does not stop them, even though they are “climate scientists”, because they do not use it. They have long-ago abandoned the rules of hard science.

And then, finally,

[O]verall, global cooling is worse for humanity and civilization than global warming. Whether by coincidence or not, many failures of civilizations and economies have appeared to hinge around sudden cooling periods. There is no corresponding evidence of warming bringing down societies. Regardless of what the actual temperature trend is, if anything, or what actually is causing it, the motivation of people who report every year the global temperature rises, but are silent every year it falls, seems worse than suspect. These people are no more to be trusted than a tobacco scientist, and for the same reason.

Arctic ice cap

I've been reading an amazing philosophy book called The Book of Absolutes by William Gairdner, a guy described as "a best-selling author, businessman, and independent scholar." --My kind of guy. (I'm no best-selling author, but I fashion myself a businessman of some type, and I attempt to be an independent scholar.)

Anyway. I thought I should look him up. What is he about? What kind of business is he in? (And why and how can he write such top-notch scholarly work?)

My search brought me to Gairdner's personal website, his blog, and, rather quickly, to a post about US Submarines at the North Pole in 1959 and 1962.

!!!!????

"In view of the recent global warming hysteria," he wrote, "you may be interested in the US Navy photos at the website below which has a number of photos showing US submarines surfacing at the North Pole in open water, 50 years ago!"

And he provided a link to a page dedicated to photos of the USS Skate (SSN-578). Do a "find" on pole to see photos of surfacings in open water at the North Pole . . . in March 1959 and August 1962 (at least).

But then Gairdner adds a postscript:

"A day after posting this, a friend sent me this link, a site that has intriguing in-depth info on the polar ice question - and more photos of submarines surfacing in water at the North Pole."

Oh, yes! Intriguing, indeed!

The opening quote alone, is worthy of attention:

It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.

(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.

President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817

But ignore this "ancient" historical reference. John Daly, the author of the page in question, provides far more information and thoughtful interpretive data . . . about global air temperatures, ice thickness, and more . . . as well as an instructive reference to how statements by scientists who are supposed to be "in the know" can skew our perspectives.

In August 2000, a Russian icebreaker, the Yamal, took a group of environmental scientists on an excursion into the Arctic Ocean. When they got to the North Pole they were greeted by an expanse of open water, photographs of which became the subject of sensationalist reporting in the media.

Among the scientists on the cruise was Dr. James McCarthy, an oceanographer, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and a lead author for the IPCC. "It was totally unexpected," he said in a report to the media. Another scientist aboard, Dr. Malcolm C. McKenna, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, remarked "I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water, not ice."

"The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago." proclaimed the New York Times in an article entitled `The North Pole is melting' (August 19, 2000).

Daly comments, "In the end, the New York Times retracted the story. But we should not be too quick to blame them - it was IPCC scientists aboard the Yamal, particularly James McCarthy, who first started the scare story. The media simply took his word at face value assuming his scientific credentials would be sufficient authority to support the story."

Lots of worthwhile stuff to ponder at The Top of the World: Is the North Pole Turning to Water?

Enjoy!

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.]

Flotsam science: low-cost rubber duckies provide clue to ocean (and sub-glacial) currents

In an era of billion-dollar space telescopes, gene machines and city-size particle accelerators, some scientists just have to make do with tub toys. From Greenland's glaciers to the boundless Pacific main, researchers are tracking thousands of rubber ducks, frogs, beer bottles and wooden tops set adrift around the world to solve critical questions of oceanography, glaciology and global warming.

[They] call it flotsam science.

The field got its start back in 1992 when a Pacific storm dumped 28,200 plastic ducks, turtles and frogs from their shipping container into the ocean. Each of the toys had a unique manufacturing code that positively identified its origin . . . thus providing a wonderful means for discovering where ocean currents travel.

Some of the toys from that accident made it through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, over the North Pole via pack ice, and into the North Atlantic Ocean. According to Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, editor of The Beachcombers Alert, the professional journal dedicated to this research.

Eleven years after its release,

one of the plastic ducks turned up in Maine, while one of the plastic frogs washed up in Scotland, more than 7,000 miles from where it started.

And the latest deliberate release of such flotsam? In August, Dr. Alberto Behar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, placed

Dr. Behar tosses some rubber ducks into the Jakobshavn Isbrae. Each duck has been imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, offers a reward for its return.90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in the largest of Greenland's 200 glaciers -- the Jakobshavn Isbrae -- which has been thinning rapidly since 1997. Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea.

Much more at the original article in the Wall Street Journal.

The climate disaster hockey stick

How do you explain what seems to be obscured too much by technical jargon and high mathematics?

Finally, a good bishop in the Anglican Church grants us an explanation of the other side of the climate controversy in terms most of us, I expect, can understand.

"Bishop Hill, a dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought," speaks of Caspar and the Jesus paper--the former referring to Caspar Amman and Eugene Wahl, associates of Michael Mann, the chief architect of the "hockey stick" graph that Al Gore used to "prove" and dismay "Inconvenient Truth" audiences about the climatic disaster we all face.

And the "Jesus Paper"? That's a supposedly scientific paper that wouldn't die. Or, rather, that kept "coming back to life" even though it really was dead. (Someone suggested Bishop Hill might have better called it the "Lazarus Paper," since "[m]iraculous risings from the dead don't always start with crucifixion.")

See how scientific that Lazarus paper is . . . and how scientific all the other papers that are dependent upon it really are.

I encourage you to read the article. It's a bit long, but well worth the minor slog--especially considering that both of the leading presidential candidates seem committed to establishing a trillion-dollar, government-sponsored march toward freedom from dependence on hydrocarbon-based energy production.

Oh. And, y'know, Gore says, the climate situation has "not improved" since his film in 2006. But if you look here, you find that he seems to have cherry-picked his data to make the situation look worse than it is. --So maybe he is telling the truth this time: it really wasn't all that bad when he first warned us. And it's no better than the "not bad" that it was when he told us about the "inconvenient truth."

--The graph Gore used "conveniently" ended in 1999 and, as the authors of the Gore Lied blog note, the creator of the graph, Dr. Spencer,

highlighted the Mt. Pinatubo cooling and the 1998 El Nino warming, and our graphics department added the release date of Al Gore's science fiction movie. Much to our amusement, it shows that the temperature has dropped approximately .58 degrees Celsius (1.04 degrees Fahrenheit) since his movie's release.

The humorous side of global warming

I figure I'll follow my brief "global warming" theme, even though this post is more about a few short humorous videos.

The Gruen Transfer was an Australian TV show focused on advertising and the advertising industry. It lasted--and maybe was designed to last--only 10 weeks--from May 28 till July 30 this year.

One of the features in each week's episode was a friendly competition between major ad agencies to create commercials designed to "sell the unsellable."

So one week, the agencies created ads designed to sell people on the benefits of global warming. Another: why Australia should invade New Zealand.

The ads about global warming, I thought, did a great job. And why Australia ought to invade New Zealand: hilarious. I think. [It is actually terrifying to imagine someone taking the invasion ads seriously. But when perceived as spoofs . . .]

I wish I could have figured out how to capture the specific videos themselves.

I couldn't.

And, sadly, while the two campaigns I've mentioned appear all in good, clean fun, many of the other ad campaigns featured on the same page are, as the show's producers themselves warn, rather coarse--grotesque in language and/or imagery.

I think, however, you should be able to enjoy the two campaigns I've referenced. Simply ignore the others. [NOTE: The page to which I link, below, contains no offensive language or images. All links are text only. I merely want to avoid having one of my readers complain about my bad taste in television programming if you go to links other than those I specifically reference.]

So. If you're willing to stick to the links I mention, please check out the "fossil fuel company climate change messages" and the "ad[s intended to] convince [Australians] that [they] need to invade New Zealand" . . . at The Gruen Transfer Past Pitch Results page.

I expect you'll view them several times each. They are really creative and--in my opinion--very funny.

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.

Better, more accessible sources on the supposed "climate disaster"

I decided I'd better do some further research on the quote about Greenland I included in my post concerning the bad science of climate change.

I'm glad I did.

I came across the World Climate Report blog, what appears to be a much more accessible source of scientifically valid responses to the fear-mongers than is Steve McIntyre's excellent, but rather dense, Climate Audit site.

And so I found Greenland's Secret, an article from March 2004, where we read,

The recent hype in Nature notwithstanding, Greenland has been cooling for the better part of two generations.

It’s hot news: Temperatures in Greenland have been rising like a rocket during the past 10 years or so—returning to the temperatures that characterized the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Yet that bit of history—that temperatures were as warm or warmer in Greenland 50 years ago—appears lost on the global warming crowd. Instead, they have increasingly pointed a finger at the changing conditions there during the past decade as a clear sign of anthropogenic global warming.

An article in the March 11, 2004, issue of Nature magazine even goes so far as to suggest that Greenland may be on a path of warming and ice loss from which it can never recover. Apparently, Nature writer Quinn Schiermeier is ignorant of the fact that 70 years ago, a similar temperature rise in Greenland was followed by six decades of cooling—it seems as if it recovered from that warming just fine!

Go down to the lower right of any page in World Climate Report, and you will find a list of other blogs and websites and a number of intriguing books and DVDs. Among the latter, I am particularly taken with The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. "Citing the pioneering work of historian of science Thomas Kuhn and economist James Buchanan, Michaels and Balling demonstrate that it was inevitable that global warming would be distorted by the political sphere and that most scientists would either stand mute or actually assist in that process. But, the authors argue, such distortions in science are always temporary, and inevitably the scientific community will concede that earlier forecasts dramatically exaggerated the threat of global warming," says the blurb.

I only hope so. And that this final message comes some time before the socialistas place us small people under the weight of draconian laws that destroy our freedoms and cause us to suffer unnecessary want.

--Somehow I think I will be returning to this subject again.

It's too scary that both leading presidential candidates seem to have jumped on the global climate disaster bandwagon. I mean, McCain has been on that bandwagon since 2004, it appears. And Obama-come-lately, of course, isn't going to let a Republican out-Green him! Why, don't you know? "[R]eplacing the oil we use with . . . home-grown biofuels . . . will finally slow the warming of the planet." (Original sentence: "But building cars that use less oil is only one side of the equation. The other involves replacing the oil we use with the home-grown biofuels that will finally slow the warming of the planet." --Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, "The Coming Storm: Energy Independence and the Safety of Our Planet," Chicago, IL, Monday, April 3rd, 2006.)

Doesn't it comfort you to know these guys are ready to "work for you"? (It doesn't me!)

I think I'd better quit now before my blood pressure rises too high!

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”.