By Peter Burrows - elburropete@gmail.com 5/20/15
In my last column, "Confirmation Bias," I mentioned a Facebook share from a liberal friend of mine, a lady I like very much, even though we're from different planets. It was an article titled "The Great Grief: How to Cope With Losing our World." The first two sentences set the tone: "Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions that are evoked by these facts and dire predictions." It goes downhill from there. (1)
My friend's comment was out of character with her usual good nature: "Even if we make great progress NOW, we will still have to deal with some of the changes anyway. Damn the holdouts and obstructionists! Yes, I am asking God, The Goddess, The Gods, et.al. to Damn them and get them out of the way because there is much work to do."
This is a clear case of confirmation bias at work, hers and also mine. She reads such an article because it reinforces her sense of righteous indignation over global warming skeptics, who reject what "climate scientists overwhelmingly say" because they are "obstructionists" who stand in the way of Saving The World. When I read such an article, it reinforces my conviction that global warmists are emotionally unable to accept any facts that disagree with their "religion." In fact, if they could, some of them would treat climate skeptics much like Muslims treat heretics and apostates. Google "James Hansen Nuremburg," or "Punish Climate Change Deniers." Note that both my liberal friend and I each think the science is on our side.
As my article on confirmation bias said, when opinions become tied to one's ego, emotions take over and it's best to avoid confrontations, when possible. With global warming, that's not possible. There's too much at stake. The global warming agenda forces billions of dollars of unnecessary costs on society, e.g. banning coal, requiring renewable fuel standards, and huge subsidies for solar, wind and biomass.
I used to think that if the skeptics could show that climate scientists do NOT overwhelmingly accept global warming's "dire predictions," then the whole global warming hype of cards would fall down. Sigh. Wrong again. Back in 2007, eight years ago, Senator Inhofe, (R-OK) published a list of over 400 scientists who disagreed with the global warming orthodoxy. Didn't make a wave then, still doesn't, even as the list of scientists has grown to over a thousand. (2)
I listed fifteen of them in my article "Global Warming's Useful Idiots and Useful Innocents" on silvercityburro.com, 6/29/14. Not one of my better efforts, but two of the scientists on that list were the Russian Dr. H. Abdussamatov and Danish physicist Dr. Henrik Svensmark. If these gentlemen are right, the absence of global warming over the next few years will become so obvious that even the mainstream media won't be able to ignore it.
Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov is Director of Space Physics at the Polkovo Observatory in St Petersburg and Russian Director of the International Space Station. He believes there is clear evidence that both short term and long term solar cycles will lead to the start of a new Little Ice Age, with declining temperatures, well into the 22nd century. He predicted the beginning of this cycle could begin as early as last year, 2014, and he thinks there will be no more global warming this century. (3)
The first publishing of Dr. Abdussamatov's research I could find was in 2005, which means that for at least ten years his hypothesis has been in the public domain. (4) Ever heard of him? Of course not. There have been numerous updates since then and at least one independent confirmation. ( 5)
I suppose global warmers will say Abdussamatov is following the dictates of his Russian masters who have a vested interest in selling oil and gas to the rest of Europe, but it his predictions are tracking actual weather/climate much, much more closely than global warming predictions, which are failing miserably. Anybody notice we are having a very cold spring? Back in Wausau, Wisconsin, where I lived for 20 years, they have had two miserable winters in a row, much like what I remember when I first moved there back in the 1960s.
Also, the work of Henrik Svensmark, author of "The Chilling Stars" with Nigel Calder, presents what I think is a compelling description of the mechanism by which solar cycles work to influence the climate. This was partially confirmed by a CERN experiment, CLOUD, which has led to more research buttressing Svensmark's hypothesis. (6)
Finally, we should not ignore research from the other side of the planet. In 2009, Chinese scientists studied tree rings on the Tibetan Plateau covering the past 2,485 years. They published their results in 2011 and confirmed that The Medieval Warming Period, The Roman Warm Period and The Little Ice Age were climatic events that occurred in Tibet and were not confined to Europe or only parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
"What's more, they found the temperature cycles were associated with solar activity, with cold intervals corresponding to sunspot minimums. Based on these findings, they predicted temperatures will decrease until 2068 A.D. and then increase once more." (7) The Chinese confirmed these results with two other studies, one using sediment cores from two Tibetan lakes, and one using sea shells from the northern South China Sea. (8)
Abdussamatov and Svensmark: Take a bow.
These hemispheric changes in climate, especially the Medieval Warming Period, cannot be explained by a global warming theory that only looks at the carbon dioxide additions caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Also, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's claim that "recent decades have been the warmest in at least the last 1,300 years" (9) is something that just cannot be said with such certitude. (10)
The Chinese are paying a lot of lip service to the carbon dioxide argument but it wouldn't surprise me if they have concluded, given the prideful and even xenophobic nature of the Chinese, that they have decided that their scientists know a helluva lot more about climate change than the Occidental Chicken Littles pushing expensive renewable energy while banning coal.
I'd even bet that the Chinese agreed to cap their CO2 emissions starting in 2030 €”2030! €”because they figure that by then the global warming argument will have been skewered by temperatures going down, not up. In the meantime, Chinese coal consumption has been growing rapidly and they are by far the world's largest user, consuming roughly four times that of number two, the U.S. Chinese coal consumption is just about equal to the U.S. on a per capita basis. I wonder what it will be by 2030?
I doubt if I'll be around to find out, but if temperatures are in fact falling, I'll bet today's global warmists will be blaming the burning of fossil fuels for that, too.
(1) http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/14/great-grief-how-cope-losing-our-world
(2) http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/1000_scientists_dissent.html
(3) http://scientificqa.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-ice-age-fast-approaching.html
(4) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005KFNT...21..471A
(5) http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/new-data-backs-ice-age-prediction/
(6) http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/sep/09/physicists-claim-further-evidence-of-link-between-cosmic-rays-and-cloud-formation cosmic-rays-and-cloud-formation
(7) Roosters of the Apocalypse by Real Jean Isaac, Heartland Institute, 2012, pg. 22 and footnote 58, pg. 96.
(8) http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N34/C2.php and
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/evidence-of-mwp-in-china/)
(9) https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms1.html
(10) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617 and
CO2 Science http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N50/EDIT.php