Sunspots, Not CO2 is Cause of Climate Change

Charlie Perry is a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, received a Ph.D in physics and astronomy at The University of Kansas. He also has spent time as a meteorologist.

Perry does not subscribe to the CO2 theory of global warming, rather, he believes firmly in the effect of sunspots as the source of global warming, and global cooling. A sunspot, Perry explains, is a location on the sun's surface that is cooler than the surrounding area. When there are more sunspots, the sun's surface becomes more dynamic and an opposite effect takes place, releasing more heat and energy when other parts of the sun become hotter.

A solar minimum is when the amount of spots on the sun is at a low and the reverse is true for a solar maximum. The complete solar cycle is about an 11-year process. Perry says the current solar minimum could continue into 2010.

"There's a fair chance it will be a cooler winter than last year," Perry said. There is a feeling from some in the scientific community the Earth may be entering into a grand minimum, which is an extended period with low numbers of sunspots that creates cooler temperatures.

Perry said there’s evidence the Earth's temperature may be slightly decreasing, but local weather patterns are much more affected by the jet stream than solar activity. However, Perry said snow in Buenos Aires and southern Africa, the best ski season in Australia and a cooler Arctic region are some of the evidence for a cooling period. So, Perry said, sunspots may have a far greater impact on weather than previously thought.

Perry is a proponent of the cosmic ray and clouds theory as opposed to the CO2 global warming theory to explain recent global warming trends. The cosmic ray and clouds theory was first put forth twenty years ago by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, and his been accepted by the scientific community until the less defensible CO2 theory emerged recently.

In a July 2007 issue of Discover magazine, Svensmark said the theory is simply that solar activity can alter the amount of clouds in the atmosphere, which affects the temperature of the Earth. More clouds mean a cooler Earth because more of the sun's heat is being reflected. Fewer clouds equal a warmer Earth.

Perry says data indicates global temperature fluctuations correlate to a statistically significant degree with the length of the sunspot cycle. Longer cycles are associated with cooler temperatures.

Johan Feddema, acting chair and professor of geography at KU, studies global warming. He is skeptical of any one phenomenon being the direct cause of global warming because there are so many climate variables that factor into global temperatures.

The CO2 theory is so thin, and contradicts most other theories regarding weather fluctuations, it's difficult to imagine how the CO2 theory gained any traction at all. Credit must go to Al Gore, and his now discredited "An Inconvenient Truth" film which environmentalists pushed blindly around the globe, much like Silent Spring was blindly accepted a generation ago.

Climate Change Scientists Backpeddaling...FAST

The New Scientist, a staunch global warming advocate, is making a fast retreat from its previous "certainty" that global warming would continue unabated unless governments across the globe acted fast, and act radically. Numerous global warming models had shown with great certainty that the earth is in trouble, that all the ice is going to melt, oceans will rise, flooding all the world's seaports, and that we will all be driven to oblivion--mostly by Americans who use more fossil fuels than anyone else, and pump carbon into the atmosphere, creating this disastrous condition.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany, and one of the authors of the IPCC report that got everyone worked up about global warming, said, "Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter, we could be about to enter one or two decades during which temperatures cool." Hmmm. And one of his collegues said, "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office. Frankly, I'm not convinced anyone know anything about 2050 either.

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be due to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades.

Well, this is absolute heresy, and this is all the "critics" and "naysayers" have been saying for the past few years, and been ridiculed for it by the eco/left. It's not like environmentalists are the only ones who know anything about the weather, or who have access to real data. But it gets better.

Eric Berger, the science editor for the Houston Chronicle writes, "For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We've been told to trust the computer models -- the models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I've trusted the scientists telling me this. When An Inconvenient Truth came out I believed the movie to be scientifically accurate.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the world: hurricane activity on the global scale is near historical lows. And the Earth seems to have stopped warming.

This, despite the fact that some of the country's leading climate scientists say there is unequivocally a link between major hurricanes and climate change. And despite the fact that other leading climate scientists predicted 2009 or 2010 will go down as the warmest year in recorded history. Either prediction, if true, would be alarming. Yet both of these predictions seem to be off." Indeed, way off.

And Richard Black, the Environmental writer for the BBC writes, "The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted."

It's difficult not to look upon the "climate change" crowd with complete disdain, not to mention distrust, because it is this "natural climate cycles" issue that critics of global warming have been spouting about for years. Warming and cooling cycles are part of the earth's weather, they have been occurring forever, so far as we can tell, and for Al Gore and the environmental extremist crowd to ridicule the critics for bringing up this little "inconvenient truth," and then turning around and admitting it is really happening (duh), discredits the entire notion of global warming as a man caused event.

Apparently, (since I have no way of counting the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere), CO2 is on the increase, and has been for decades, if not millennia; yet, the uncooperative global weather has the gall to stop warming. And for a highly educated and respected scientist like Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, Cambridge, MA, to state matter of factly that CO2 is a minor atmospheric constituent, (.003%) and as such it’s variations are not important, must really stick in the craw of Al Gore and his cronies.

Because increasing numbers of "skeptics" are coming out of the closet, and because even the environmentalists themselves are having to admit their folley and falseness regarding global warming; this brings into question the entire premise, not to mention "facts," of global warming.

Cooling is Still Warming

The logic of the GWBC (Global Warming Brainwashing Crowd) is astounding. According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years. So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.

Indeed, real, recorded data show 1998 was the peak warm year, and every year since has been cooler than 1998. But that doesn't deter the folks at GWBC. David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. states, "These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability, It's easy to 'cherry pick' a period to reinforce a point of view."

So according to him, even when temperatures are cooling, they are still warming, and it doesn't matter if global temperatures cool for a couple of decades, we must remember, the earth is still warming. Ok, I guess I follow that. The point is, these guys are drinking their own cool aid, they're going to argue for global warming even when the earth is cooling.

John Cristy the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, declares, "Our ignorance of the climate system is still enormous, and our policy makers need to know that . . . We really don't know much about what causes multi-year changes like this."

Of their own admission, there are climate variations they don't understand; but they go to great lengths to reassure us that the earth really is warming--even when it's cooling, or that variations are irrelevant because the earth really is warming--even when it's cooling.

The GWBC must maintain their position, and argue, no matter how irrationally, that global warming continues even when it's cooling, because the underlying theory to global warming is that it is caused by man, by fossil fuels, by industrialization, by driving SUVs, and that it has reached critical mass, that if we don't act immediately, there will be no changing it later.

So when the earth actually shows a cooling trend, these so-called scientists get apoplexy and start to hyperventilate because the underlying theory of man caused global warming is drawn into severe question--and they can't have that. The theory must stand even if the facts do not.

Global Warming, The New Intellectual Religion

Ian Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University in Australia--and an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behavior is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behavior -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's history.

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come. [An edited account of an editorial in the Vancouver Sun, July 29, 2009]

But if Al Gore, President Obama, and a brainwashed Congress have their way, they attempt to legislate against global warming, and tax mankind back to the stone age, doing far more harm than good, as is typical of political intervention. And since this is truly a "religion," it must be accepted on faith (science certainly doesn't defend it very well), the "preachers" of this new religion must be revered and blindly followed, for to disagree is heresy. The punishment for heresy is exclusion from the church, denying publishing rights, refusal to be heard, and public scorn in the modern press.

Could we [they] be wrong about global warming?

"Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?" This from USA Today, one of the nation's fine, liberal newspapers. To admit this publicly is astounding. Scientists and weather experts by the hundreds have been screaming to be heard on this issue for years.

The article goes on, "In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Theoretical, computer models should all be thrown away, far far away; they are utterly worthless. I'll put it more strongly, these models are being used to deceive us, to manipulate the data, to make it appear something is happening, that is not really happening. The other, ugly, side of this issue is that global warming is being driven by radical environmentalists who want complete power over our lives--and it has nothing to do with the environment, it has everything to do with power. The sooner we wake up to this fact, the safer we will be.

Deniers Popping Up Everywhere

The list of scientists, experts, and governments now lining up as skeptics on global warming/climate change, is growing. The central issue is this: 1) man is causing global warming (primarily through the use of fossil fuels), 2) carbon is the cause of global warming . Actually, carbon accounts for only .003% of our atmosphere, carbon's contribution, if any, is minuscule and irrelevant. But true, born again environmentalists have for decades sought ways to limit growth, reduce the use of carbon based fuels, and get man to live more caveman like; you know, stop using air conditioning, build smaller homes, drive less, fly less, eat less...well, you get the idea.

But despite Al Gore's absurd declaration that "the debate is over," ever increasing numbers of scientists, experts and governments, not to mention the general public, are fighting back and showing how silly this whole global warming thing really is. And if you're a meteorologist, the notion that man can affect the weather is quite silly.

Here is a partial list of the new "deniers:"
1. In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming.
2. the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role.
3. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted.
4. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
5. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers.
6. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief.
7. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history."
8. Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."
9. A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
10. Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming.
11. Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence."

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

This information came from an editorial by KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL, in the Wall Street Journal.

Global Climate is NOT Changing

The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters.

Dr. Roger Pielke, is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and he sends a blistering criticism of the IPCC, and the White House position on Climate Change.

Dr. Pielke contrasts these reports’ conclusions about trends in natural disasters with the some quite different findings last year by the federal Climate Change Science Program. Dr. Pielke summarizes some of its less sensational conclusions:

1. Over the long-term, U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.
3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation . . . there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).
4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms
5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.
6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Do those benign trends seem surprising to you? “Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to criticize the climate science community.”

Record Low Highs in West

The Western United States is experiencing an extended period of record low, high temperatures. Temperatures in Utah are ten degrees, or more, below normal, and have been for the past three weeks. It's the middle of June, and temperatures, statewide (all western states are experiencing similar, cooler temperatures) are unseasonably cool. Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and other areas of the west are experiencing unusually cool temperatures for this time of year. This, in view of the fact that last year in Utah, the winter and spring experienced record cold.

The global warming alarmists are so far off the mark, it's difficult to give them any credibility at all. Temperatures, currently, are tracking at the 1980 level, not the record warm temperatures projected by popular computer models, which have proven to be totally worthless, and way, way off the mark.

No Record High Temps in 35 Years

No continents have set a record high temperature since 1974. This is not even remotely consistent with claims that current temperatures are unusually high. Quite the contrary.
Below is the recorded data/continent/temp/year. From http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/27/are-record-temperatures-abnormal/

Continent	Temperature	Year
Africa	136F	1922
North America	134F	1913
Asia	129F	1942
Australia	128F	1889
Europe	122F	1881
South America	120F	1905
Antarctica	59F	1974

All high temperature data, record warm temperatures, etc, come from computer models--not real recorded data. It is from these models that the president, congress, the EPA, and all the environmentalists get all riled up about. But these computer models always come out way high, they do not reflect reality. Essentially, computer models are worthless, except for propaganda purposes.

Global Warming Data and Facts

From Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, Cambridge, MA

Richard Siegmund Lindzen Ph.D. (b. February 8, 1940, Webster, Massachusetts) is a Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The following are some of his observations and conclusions:


1. CO2 has been increasing since the early 1800s, well before the industrial revolution
2. CO2 is a minor atmospheric constituent, (.003%) and as such it’s variations are not important.
3. Increased CO2 also stimulates the growth of vegetation
4. As far as we know, there is no direct adverse effect of CO2 on human beings.
5. Although models suggest a global warming (since 1880) of 2-5C, observable data cannot even show a .5C increase in temperature; and anything less than .5C simply show negative feedback.
6. [Global Temperatures] The determination of the globally averaged temperature is virtually impossible.
a. Temperatures vary widely even over short distances.
b. Two thirds of the earth’s surface is water, and we have no permanent monitoring stations over the earth’s oceans. Observations come from ships, which are rarely in the exact same spot when reporting, nor do they present a controlled reporting environment.
c. There is also “natural variability” from year to year, regardless of CO2 increases or decreases, so the cause of variability is subjective, or unknown entirely.
d. None of the three standard observable calculations indicate any significant temperature change since the mid 1800s. (Possibly a quarter of a degree)
e. On the basis of the records available, the best estimate for the global temperature change that has occurred over the industrial period, does not significantly vary from zero, suggesting that current models are exaggerating expected warming.
f. Data suggests it was warmer prior to 1880, than afterward.
g. The major sharp increase occurred prior to 1940, after which, temperatures dropped, causing experts to predict an ice age. In 1960, temperatures began a slight increase.
h. There is clearly variance in the record on all time scales.
i. The absence of any significant trend in the contiguous 48 states, leads to the suspicion that all the trends in the global record may be spurious.
j. Since 1978, satellite soundings over the 48 states correlate excellently with the land based thermometric record.
k. Computer models do not even accurately simulate present day regional variations, calling into question their global variations.
l. About the only thing the models agree on is that warming temperatures will be greatly exaggerated in polar regions. Observations show that the arctic is not warming, but cooling.
7. [Green House] Given the data alone, we would have little basis for alarm regarding the greenhouse effect. The alarm, instead, comes from theoretical considerations.
a. The earth’s current average temperature (15 degrees C), is close to the “black body” temperature (the temperature without any greenhouse warming).
b. All models showing a doubling of the CO2 level, both in the past, and at present, fail to reveal any significant green house effect. These models also predicted a warming effect, over the past 100 years, in the polar regions; however, the predictions are contradicted by the observed cooling in polar regions.
c. [Models]The remarkable thermodynamic characteristics of water, lead to its acting as nature’s thermostat. Yet, the major numerical models all give water a positive warming effect, showing that the effect of doubling CO2 to be much less than the models predict.
d. Water is a far more important green house gas than CO2.
e. Although the green house absorption is primarily important above 5km (from the surface of the earth), greenhouse models attribute it at all levels of the atmosphere. Ignoring the fact that convection and lower cloud formation significantly reduces the green house effect above 5km.
f. Global warming leads to drying of the upper atmosphere above 5 km (as opposed to moistening which occurs in most models) and leads to the elevation of the altitude at which convected heat is deposited, producing negative, rather than positive, green house effects.
g. Consistent with past data, models should predict a warming effect of only a few tenths of a degree.
h. The current state of our understanding of climate hardly justifies a consensus over the response of climate caused by the theoretical doubling of CO2.
8. If there is any single major impediment to understanding climate, it may very well be the lack of capable scientists.
9. It is difficult to imagine any practical action that will make much difference to the final outcome (of climate).
10. Large changes in CO2 emissions (20-40%) will, at most, reduce warming by a fraction of a degree.