Tweet
Is Global Warming a Hoax?
The New American
Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca Terrell
1/6/2015
Excerpts:
In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.
They have a very good reason. Actual temperature data doesn’t cooperate with their party line that mankind is ruining the planet with its addiction to so-called fossil fuels and its appetite for ample, affordable energy. Too few taxpayers are demanding proof, and too many are willing to accept global-warming fictions on blind faith, opening the door for federal regulators to foist irrational energy restrictions on the public. Understanding Earth’s climate fluctuations will make us much less willing to let them stifle our economic, industrial, and social progress, while understanding environmentalists’ true motives may incite us to expose their deceit.
The Holocene Period
Paleoclimatologists are scientists who study Earth’s climate history, and two specific studies outshine others in their field in terms of scope and consensus in the scientific community. The multinational European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) lasted from January 1996 until December 2006, earning the European Union’s 2008 Descartes Prize for Research. Investigation at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica has been going on since the 1970s. Both groups have studied ice cores as deep as two miles, establishing climate chronology from changes in layering thickness and measuring historic temperature data from varying ratios of oxygen isotopes in entrapped air bubbles.
Figure 1 (....) plots ice core data, covering the past 11,700 years — an age known as the Holocene period — with present day included at the far right of the graph. The thick black line traces the average of eight different temperature reconstructions. It highlights the Holocene Optimum, which occurred between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago. Climate alarmists conveniently overlook evidence during the Holocene optimum where there were extended periods of temperatures exceeding the averages by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present temperatures.
............................
Though temperatures have been falling ever since, the decline hasn’t been steady. About 3,300 years ago temperatures peaked during the Minoan Warm Period, and again during the Roman Warm Period some 2,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period occurred 1,000 years ago, when wine vineyards dotted the landscape in Great Britain and Vikings grew corn and barley in Greenland. Each of these eras was warmer than today. Additionally, two significantly low dips are the 8200 Cold Period and the Little Ice Age, 400 to 500 years ago.
The Little Ice Age, Greenland, and Some Glaciers
The Little Ice Age is troublesome for global-warming alarmists, since historical evidence suggests the period had extremely low global temperatures, which began recovering only as recently as the mid-19th century. During this era, the Thames River in England froze solid during the winter with ice so thick Londoners held “frost fairs” on it. Noted 17th-century English diarist John Evelyn described what he saw at the fair of 1683-84:
Coaches [carriages] plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs too and fro, as in the streets; sleds, sliding with skeetes, a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cooks, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.
There were five winters during the Little Ice Age when the Thames froze thick enough to hold a frost fair: 1683-84, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and 1814. According to Tom de Castella, writing for BBC News Magazine in January 2014, during the last of these, carnival-goers watched an elephant tramp across the river.
But Evelyn’s diary also describes the extreme misery of such severe winters. “The fowls, fish and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens universally perishing,” he wrote. “Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear that there were great contributions to keep the poor alive.”
The harsh conditions weren’t limited to London or to latitudes north of England. As recently as the American Civil War, the Little Ice Age still had a grip on the Southern United States. In his book The Civil War Quadrennium, Sir William O’Donnell relates that temperatures were so cold during the winter of 1863-64 that the “Arkansas River was frozen solid at Little Rock for many months,” and people could easily trudge from north to south banks without fear.
Such climate records prove the planet has been warming for hundreds of years from the Little Ice Age minimum. Hence a slow increase in temperature is the norm over the last century or so, and not a catastrophe in the making.
But the Little Ice Age is not warmists’ only antagonist. Global-warming alarmists see red at the mere mention of “Greenland.” In 986 A.D. Erik the Red arrived and built a prosperous civilization there. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History website describes archeological expeditions that have uncovered abandoned Viking settlements beneath the country’s now-frozen tundra and remains of ancient forests far above the current natural tree line. Yet by 1450 A.D., most Norsemen had left the country. Why? “Most likely, the extinction resulted from a complex set of events related to climatic cooling, over-population and economic stress,” states the Smithsonian website.
Strange to hear “climatic cooling” blamed for human woes, and overpopulation in a land that, according to the World Bank, is now the least-densely populated country in the world. Obviously Greenland was much warmer when the Vikings thrived there than it is today.
Like Greenland and the Little Ice Age, glaciers aren’t cooperating with climate alarmists either, though glacier retreat is supposedly a harbinger of doom for our warming planet. On the contrary, it has been following the pattern you would expect during recovery from the Little Ice Age. The website for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) offers the example of Glacier National Park (GNP) in Montana. An estimated 150 glaciers blanketed the land in 1850, most of which still existed in 1910 when the park was established. “In 2010, we consider there to be only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres remaining in GNP,” reads the site.
But the exciting news is what’s popping up from underneath these retreating ice rivers. “Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest ‘tomb,’” reported the Juneau Empire in September 2013, quoting a University of Alaska Southeast geology professor who dates tree stumps from under the Mendenhall Glacier between 1,400 and 2,350 years old, corresponding to both the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods.
Forests aren’t the only finds. In 2003, Swiss archaeologists discovered clothes, weapons, and animal remains at the edge of the retreating Alpine Schnidejoch Glacier. According to German newspaper Tages Spiegel, the researchers were excited about the relics from a time when the glacial zone began roughly 700 meters higher than it does today, the “timber line had climbed substantially,” and “temperatures in the Swiss Alps were up to two degrees over today’s.”
It’s clear such evidence and scientific consensus don’t play along with the climate-change charade. Instead, they free mankind from blame for climate fluctuations.
Satellite vs. Surface
We rely on ice core analysis to discover temperature trends of the past millennia because there was no reliable measurement system prior to 1714 when Daniel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury-in-glass thermometer. His device came into general use in the late 1800s, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) confirms that “there was a net global warming of about 0.4º Celsius between the 1880s and 1970s.”
The year 1979 saw the launch of the first temperature-gauging satellites, and suddenly we were not limited to data from ground stations, sea buoys, merchant vessels, and weather balloons. Research by environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of Canada’s University of Guelph explains the drastic effect satellites had on how global temperatures are measured.
.....................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/e...warming-a-hoax
The New American
Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca Terrell
1/6/2015
Excerpts:
In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.
They have a very good reason. Actual temperature data doesn’t cooperate with their party line that mankind is ruining the planet with its addiction to so-called fossil fuels and its appetite for ample, affordable energy. Too few taxpayers are demanding proof, and too many are willing to accept global-warming fictions on blind faith, opening the door for federal regulators to foist irrational energy restrictions on the public. Understanding Earth’s climate fluctuations will make us much less willing to let them stifle our economic, industrial, and social progress, while understanding environmentalists’ true motives may incite us to expose their deceit.
The Holocene Period
Paleoclimatologists are scientists who study Earth’s climate history, and two specific studies outshine others in their field in terms of scope and consensus in the scientific community. The multinational European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) lasted from January 1996 until December 2006, earning the European Union’s 2008 Descartes Prize for Research. Investigation at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica has been going on since the 1970s. Both groups have studied ice cores as deep as two miles, establishing climate chronology from changes in layering thickness and measuring historic temperature data from varying ratios of oxygen isotopes in entrapped air bubbles.
Figure 1 (....) plots ice core data, covering the past 11,700 years — an age known as the Holocene period — with present day included at the far right of the graph. The thick black line traces the average of eight different temperature reconstructions. It highlights the Holocene Optimum, which occurred between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago. Climate alarmists conveniently overlook evidence during the Holocene optimum where there were extended periods of temperatures exceeding the averages by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present temperatures.
............................
Though temperatures have been falling ever since, the decline hasn’t been steady. About 3,300 years ago temperatures peaked during the Minoan Warm Period, and again during the Roman Warm Period some 2,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period occurred 1,000 years ago, when wine vineyards dotted the landscape in Great Britain and Vikings grew corn and barley in Greenland. Each of these eras was warmer than today. Additionally, two significantly low dips are the 8200 Cold Period and the Little Ice Age, 400 to 500 years ago.
The Little Ice Age, Greenland, and Some Glaciers
The Little Ice Age is troublesome for global-warming alarmists, since historical evidence suggests the period had extremely low global temperatures, which began recovering only as recently as the mid-19th century. During this era, the Thames River in England froze solid during the winter with ice so thick Londoners held “frost fairs” on it. Noted 17th-century English diarist John Evelyn described what he saw at the fair of 1683-84:
Coaches [carriages] plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs too and fro, as in the streets; sleds, sliding with skeetes, a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cooks, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.
There were five winters during the Little Ice Age when the Thames froze thick enough to hold a frost fair: 1683-84, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and 1814. According to Tom de Castella, writing for BBC News Magazine in January 2014, during the last of these, carnival-goers watched an elephant tramp across the river.
But Evelyn’s diary also describes the extreme misery of such severe winters. “The fowls, fish and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens universally perishing,” he wrote. “Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear that there were great contributions to keep the poor alive.”
The harsh conditions weren’t limited to London or to latitudes north of England. As recently as the American Civil War, the Little Ice Age still had a grip on the Southern United States. In his book The Civil War Quadrennium, Sir William O’Donnell relates that temperatures were so cold during the winter of 1863-64 that the “Arkansas River was frozen solid at Little Rock for many months,” and people could easily trudge from north to south banks without fear.
Such climate records prove the planet has been warming for hundreds of years from the Little Ice Age minimum. Hence a slow increase in temperature is the norm over the last century or so, and not a catastrophe in the making.
But the Little Ice Age is not warmists’ only antagonist. Global-warming alarmists see red at the mere mention of “Greenland.” In 986 A.D. Erik the Red arrived and built a prosperous civilization there. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History website describes archeological expeditions that have uncovered abandoned Viking settlements beneath the country’s now-frozen tundra and remains of ancient forests far above the current natural tree line. Yet by 1450 A.D., most Norsemen had left the country. Why? “Most likely, the extinction resulted from a complex set of events related to climatic cooling, over-population and economic stress,” states the Smithsonian website.
Strange to hear “climatic cooling” blamed for human woes, and overpopulation in a land that, according to the World Bank, is now the least-densely populated country in the world. Obviously Greenland was much warmer when the Vikings thrived there than it is today.
Like Greenland and the Little Ice Age, glaciers aren’t cooperating with climate alarmists either, though glacier retreat is supposedly a harbinger of doom for our warming planet. On the contrary, it has been following the pattern you would expect during recovery from the Little Ice Age. The website for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) offers the example of Glacier National Park (GNP) in Montana. An estimated 150 glaciers blanketed the land in 1850, most of which still existed in 1910 when the park was established. “In 2010, we consider there to be only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres remaining in GNP,” reads the site.
But the exciting news is what’s popping up from underneath these retreating ice rivers. “Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest ‘tomb,’” reported the Juneau Empire in September 2013, quoting a University of Alaska Southeast geology professor who dates tree stumps from under the Mendenhall Glacier between 1,400 and 2,350 years old, corresponding to both the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods.
Forests aren’t the only finds. In 2003, Swiss archaeologists discovered clothes, weapons, and animal remains at the edge of the retreating Alpine Schnidejoch Glacier. According to German newspaper Tages Spiegel, the researchers were excited about the relics from a time when the glacial zone began roughly 700 meters higher than it does today, the “timber line had climbed substantially,” and “temperatures in the Swiss Alps were up to two degrees over today’s.”
It’s clear such evidence and scientific consensus don’t play along with the climate-change charade. Instead, they free mankind from blame for climate fluctuations.
Satellite vs. Surface
We rely on ice core analysis to discover temperature trends of the past millennia because there was no reliable measurement system prior to 1714 when Daniel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury-in-glass thermometer. His device came into general use in the late 1800s, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) confirms that “there was a net global warming of about 0.4º Celsius between the 1880s and 1970s.”
The year 1979 saw the launch of the first temperature-gauging satellites, and suddenly we were not limited to data from ground stations, sea buoys, merchant vessels, and weather balloons. Research by environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of Canada’s University of Guelph explains the drastic effect satellites had on how global temperatures are measured.
.....................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/e...warming-a-hoax
Comment