By Bob Livingston, Mike Shedlock,
History has not been kind to dire global warming predictions
Recent pronouncements from American communist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Airhead-NY) and Robert Frances (call me Beto) O’Rourke (Nothingburger-Texas) have warned us that we have a limited time before the Earth succumbs to global warming climate change and civilization is lost. Depending upon which knucklehead you listen to, we’re doomed in 10 years or 12. Such dire predictions are not without precedent.
Thirty years ago The Associated Press, quoting a senior United Nations environmental official, predicted a worldwide disaster if something wasn’t done about global warming. Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP), warned that entire nations could wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend wasn’t reversed by the year 2000. In the article dated June 29, 1989, Brown said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
The flooding he predicted would come from melting polar ice caps that would cause sea levels to rise by three feet. That would be enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The AP.
Other calamities that would accompany the rising seas included ecological refugees with no place to live – because people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life – and 1930s-like Dust Bowl conditions in the Canadian and U.S. wheatland areas.
Brown told The AP that excess carbon dioxide was pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity’s use of fossil fuels and burning of the rain forests, causing a greenhouse effect. The most conservative scientific estimate is that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
While 1 to 7 degrees might seem to be a slight rise to some people, Brown said, the Earth is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year ice age that ended 10,000 years ago.
Brown attributed that 9-degree rise to Fred Flinstone and his cohorts’ use of fossil fuels in the construction of their foot-powered SUVs and dinosaur-fitted devices for mining and manufacturing. (OK. I made that up. Brown didn’t attribute that warming to anything, which automatically puts a major hole in his logic.)
Brown did, however, warn that if the warming trend continues, “the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.”
He said even the most conservative scientists “already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a … change” of about 3 degrees.
“Anything beyond that, and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels … we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.”
He said there is time to act, but there is no time to waste, as The AP reported.
Well, turns out that 30 years later not even the manipulated temperature charts that NASA and NOAA have turned out come close to confirming Brown’s dire predictions. According to NASA, global temperatures are about 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in 1906.
But recall that we told you last week, a Japanese climate scientist has debunked global temperature calculations in a new book in which he points out that prior to 1980 there weren’t enough temperature monitoring stations or satellites to actually gauge temperatures around the plant, and all predictions of global warming are like Brown’s and the U.N.’s: fake new.
Also, NASA is now predicting global cooling because of an inactive sun. And in fact, from February 2016 to February 2018 global average temperatures dropped .56 degrees C. You have to go back to 1982-1984 to find the next biggest two-year drop of .47 C., according to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Amidst Global Warming Hysteria, NASA Expects Global Cooling
The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.
The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity. Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.
If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself, you’re right — sort of. After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began. Isn’t that a sure sign of global warming?
All any of this “proves” is that we have, at best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system.So when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate.
Incredibly Complex Systems
See the problem? Alarmists take one variable, CO2 that is only a tiny part of extremely long cycles and make projections far into to the future based off it.
When I was in grade school, the alarmists were worried about global cooling. Amusingly, I recall discussing in science class the need to put soot on the arctic ice to melt it to stop the advance of glaciers.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.
NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme warming.”
Geo-engineering: Ignoring the Consequences
Watts Up With That discusses Geo-Engineering: Ignoring the Consequences.
From 1940 to almost 1980, the average global temperature went down. Political concerns and the alleged scientific consensus focused on global cooling. Alarmists said it could be the end of agriculture and civilization. Journalist Lowell Ponte wrote in his 1976 book, The Cooling.
The problem then was – and still is now – that people are educated in the false philosophy of uniformitarianism: the misguided belief that conditions always were and always will be as they are now, and any natural changes will occur over long periods of time.
Consequently, most people did not understand that the cooling was part of the natural cycle of climate variability, or that changes are often huge and sudden. Just 18,000 years ago we were at the peak of an Ice Age. Then, most of the ice melted and sea levels rose 150 meters (490 feet), because it was warmer for almost all of the last 10,000 years than it is today.
During the cooling “danger,” geo-engineering proposals included:
* building a dam across the Bering Straits to block cold Arctic water, to warm the North Pacific and the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere;
* dumping black soot on the Arctic ice cap to promote melting;
* adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere to raise global temperatures.
“Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” as advocated by the IPCC in its October 8 news conference, is also foolish. Historic records show that, at about 410 parts per million (ppm), the level of CO2 supposedly in the atmosphere now, we are near the lowest in the last 280 million years. As plants evolved over that time, the average level was 1200 ppm. That is why commercial greenhouses boost CO2 to that level to increase plant growth and yields by a factor of four.
The IPCC has been wrong in every prediction it’s made since 1990. It would be a grave error to use its latest forecasts as the excuse to engage in geo-engineering experiments with the only planet we have.
Global Warming Errs Badly
Next, please consider Extreme weather not proof of global warming, NASA on global cooling
To understand the great confusion about global warming or climate change, my most lucid guide has been Dr. Richard Lindzen — a former Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT and member of the US National Academy of Sciences — and his now famous lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation last October 8.
In just a number of segments of his lecture, Dr. Lindzen crystallized for me why the church of global warming errs so badly in its dogma.
Global warming promoters fostered the popular public perception of the science of climate change as quite simple. It is that here’s one phenomenon to be explained (“global average temperature,” or GAT, which, says Lindzen, is a thoroughly unscientific concept). And there’s one explanation for it: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
GAT is only one of many important phenomena to measure in the climate system, and CO2 is only one of many factors that influence both GAT and all the other phenomena.
CO2’s role in controlling GAT is at most perhaps 2 percent, yet climate alarmists think of it as the “control knob.”
Most people readily confuse weather (short-term, local-scale temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind, cloudiness, and more) with climate (long-term, large-scale of each) and think weather phenomena are driven by climate phenomena; they aren’t.
Consequently, as Lindzen says, the currently popular narrative concerning this system is this: The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1 to 2 percent perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable — carbon dioxide — among many variables of comparable importance.
Big Chill
Did You Know the Greatest Two-Year Global Cooling Event Just Took Place?
Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/). This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures.
The 2016-18 Big Chill was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average. February 2018 was colder than February 1998. If someone is tempted to argue that the reason for recent record cooling periods is that global temperatures are getting more volatile, it’s not true. The volatility of monthly global average temperatures since 2000 is only two-thirds what it was from 1880 to 1999.
None of this argues against global warming. The 1950s was the last decade cooler than the previous decade, the next five decades were all warmer on average than the decade before. Two year cooling cycles, even if they set records, are statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.
My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no media attention. The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If they show a new hottest year on record, that’s a big story. If they show a big increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year, that’s a story. If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that’s a story. When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there’s no story.
Bombarded With Garbage
Of course you did not know that unless you follow NASA, Real Clear Markets, or Watts Up With That.
Meanwhile, everyone is constantly bombarded with total garbage like Al Gore’s claim Migrant Caravans are Victims of Global Warming.
And of course, the media is fawning all over AOC’s “New Green Deal” hype as she too is a believer the World Will End in 12 Years if we don’t address climate change.
The Guardian and the Intercept are both happy to promote this nonsense as of course the entirety of mainstream media.
Alarm Bells
When I was in grade school we had major alarm bells over global cooling. In high school it was population growth. Then came food shortages followed by peak oil.
Now the crisis du jour is global warming.
It’s always about something!
CO2 Derangement Symptom
Watts Up With That accurately labels global warming hysteria as the CO2 Derangement Syndrome.
That’s an excellent synopsis of the current state of affairs so please give it a good look.
Finally, even if you still believe man-made global warming is a threat, please ponder the notion that governments will not do anything sensible about it.
Scientists Find Earth is Cooling, Not Warming; NASA Predicts Mini-Ice Age
Humanity could soon face a long, cold winter which could see temperatures around the globe plunge to record lows that will herald a “mini-Ice Age”, according to new scientific research by NASA.
‘We see a cooling trend,’ Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center told Space Weather, directly contradicting decades of global warming hysteria and false science promoted by conflicted scientists, politicians and mainstream media.
‘High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.’
Metro reports: Sunspot activity follows a cycle which is believed to last 11 years as the number of patches peaks and drops.
There have been very few spots on the sun for most of this year. This could mean that it will get very cold, very quickly.
However, it’s difficult to predict the impact of solar activity on the Earth and scientists are stil debating how sunspots affect our weather.
‘It could happen in a matter of months,’ Mlynczak added.
Earlier this year, NASA released a picture showing the blank face of the sun looking more like a snooker ball than the roiling surface of a super-hot star.
The sun is predicted to reach its ‘solar minimum’ low point in 2019 or 2020, according to Nasa’s calculations.
Perhaps the most famous period of low sunspot activity was the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century.
During that time, there was a ‘little ice age’ when London’s Thames River froze over, although researchers believe that global warming will stop this happening again. Solar minimum may enhance the effects of space weather, disrupt communications and navigation, and even cause space junk to ‘hang around’, Nasa said.
Last year, a scientist claimed the chilling effect on the lack of sunspots could actually save us from global warming – although her claims were hotly disputed.
Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University, published a paper which contains ‘the first serious prediction of a reduction of solar activity that might affect human lives’.
‘I hope global warming will be overridden by this effect, giving humankind and the Earth 30 years to sort out our pollution,’ she said.
