Articles Tagged "Dennis T. Avery"

Awful climate extremes of the past 10,000 years

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted last week it had no evidence to support the various claims that the planet’s weather is becoming “more extreme.” The new IPCC report on weather extremes reads: “While there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gases have likely caused changes in some types of extremes, there is no simple answer to question of whether the climate, in general, has become more or less extreme.”

Incredibly, even this non-confirmation is false. The more correct answer is “less extreme.” Moreover, paleoclimate proxy records have already told us about the truly awful climate extremes of the past 10,000 years—most of them mega-droughts during “little ice ages.” For example, the 300-year drought that beset today’s Iraq in 2200 BC. The inhabitants all starved, and the land was left to a few nomadic shepherds until the warm phase of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle returned stable weather. Then the Tigris-Euphrates Valley produced a new irrigated agriculture and built the world’s first cities. This valley’s devastation/recovery pattern has happened at least seven different times, in the D-O’s 1,500-year rhythm.

Nor did the IPCC mention the 11th century AD mega-drought in the northern California mountains, with lake levels falling 70 feet below “normal.” At the same time, the Anasazi and dozens of other western Indian tribes were driven from their homes forever. In the Corn Belt, the mega-drought destroyed Cahokia, Illinois, the only city the AmerIndians ever built.

Little Ice Age lasted about 550 years

Churchville, VA –Here we go again. Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago Christopher Columbus was being blamed for the Little Ice Age (AD 1300 to 1850). Now, a new computer “study” announced that volcanoes caused the Little Ice Age! A research team led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado says eruptions of four volcanoes just before AD 1300 spewed huge amounts of sulphates into the air, which cooled the Arctic and “grew” the Arctic ice sheets and glaciers.

I find a few problems with this “news,” starting with the reality that the Little Ice Age lasted about 550 years! How do volcanic eruptions—even from four very big volcanoes—throw up enough space dust to cool the planet for five centuries!? Two years, certainly, perhaps even ten years for an awesome eruption such as Krakatoa in 1883—but not 500. Climate historian Hubert Lamb notes that “in 1783, when there were two very great eruptions—in Iceland and in Japan—in the same year, the combined effect may have been a cooling of the northern hemisphere by 1.3 degrees C, gradually tailing away to zero over the following four or five years.”

My second problem is that Dr Miller doesn’t know which volcanoes erupted! His team suspects the spewing mountains were in the tropics. Their global computer model told them that the Little Ice Age must have been touched off by volcanic eruptions. So, even though they haven’t found the culprit mountains, we are expected to accept the theory. These are the global climate models that have already predicted far more global warming than we’ve gotten, and whose programmers forgot to put in the Medieval Warming. Now they’re inventing volcanic eruptions whose residues have not been found in the volcanic sediment record.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earth has stopped warming, but the greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate at higher levels in the atmosphere. In fact, it seems certain that the planet will have rising levels of atmospheric CO2 for the foreseeable future. No country has actually produced substantial cuts in its greenhouse emissions, and Asia continues to strongly increase its output of industrial gasses. Nor have any of the “renewable” energy sources been cost-effective enough to survive the coming budget cuts in Europe and the U.S.

Will the extra CO2 affect the biodiversity of the earth? Some have claimed that C3 plants will now out-compete C4 plants, that weeds will outgrow crop plants, and tall forest trees will shade out the understory species. (The C3 and C4 plants have different patterns of photosynthesis.)

However, Craig Idso of the Center for CO2 Science says we shouldn’t expect much change in our plant diversity due to the expected higher CO2 levels. Idso, trained in agronomy and geography, sees no clear threat to the earth’s species richness.

As an example, he notes, C3 plants like corn have shown a larger growth response to higher CO2 levels than C4 plants. C4 plants, however, appear to gain more in their ability to raise their water use efficiency—perhaps because they seem to make better use of the mycorrhizal fungi around their roots. The two sets of advantages seem to cancel each other out. Nitrogen-fixing plants seemed to have an advantage over non-nitrogen-fixers—but that was in studies inside greenhouses. Outdoors that advantage disappeared.

Earth’s lack of warming since 1998

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The man-made warming activists at the UN are trapped in turmoil over how to deal with the earth’s lack of warming since 1998. A week or so ago, the UN climate panel circulated a draft statement that would have admitted we’re unlikely to have any further earth-warming for the next 30 years “because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability.”

The BBC’s environmental reporter Richard Black reported that he’d received a copy of that draft. Black said he expected member governments to reject the statement, however, because it would embarrass the first-world governments’ green energy subsidies and taxes agenda. It would also have finally killed the world’s climate-terror campaign.

In fact, NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory had already told us months ago to expect moderate global cooling for the next three decades due to a quiet period on the sun, and a consequent cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s huge heat mass.

Arctic was nearly ice-free in the first Holocene Warm Period

Perhaps the silliest thing about the modern global warming debate is that we’re trying to evaluate major climate changes in eye-blinks of time such as 10 or 30 years. The big Ice Age cycle lasts about 90,000 years, the last one ended about 12,000 years ago. El Ninos last a year of two and change nothing, climate-wise. The Weather Channel can (sort of) predict ten days out.

Yet the UN panel’s claims of man-made warming are based on an “unprecedented warming” that was only 22 years long, 1976–1998. There’s been no trace of a warming trend since. There was, however, an earlier “unprecedented warming” from 1915–1940—before the Industrial Revolution started seriously raising the C02 levels.

At the moment, the alarmists are frantically predicting that the Arctic will become ice-free any minute now, all the polar bears will starve, and we’ll be sorry we didn’t listen. The Russians, however, say the Arctic region has recently been about at the peak warmth of its own 70-year climate cycle—and the Russians know the Arctic. There are, additionally, lots of old news stories in the New York Times files that made the same “unprecedented” claims about Arctic melting in the 1920s and 30s. Let’s also remember that there are two Poles and the Antarctic has been building ice for the last 40 years.

Fuel Poverty: British cost of electricity is rising about six times as fast as British household incomes

CHURCHVILLE, VA— “When people on average earnings start to fall into ‘fuel poverty,’ it is clear that Britain is in the grip of a living standards crisis,” leads the UK’s Daily Express of Oct. 12. “On current trends every British household on a middling income will be defined as living in fuel poverty within four years . . . add in the bills for running a car and the picture becomes bleaker still . . . All the old complacent assumptions about Britain being a securely prosperous country must be jettisoned.”

One-fourth of British households may be forced into “fuel poverty” by 2015 as the British government raises electricity and gas taxes to invest in more high-cost renewable energy—especially high-cost and erratic offshore wind turbines.

“So it is time for Britain to abandon unilateral and unrealistic targets for cutting CO2 emissions, especially where they will only be achieved by investing a fortune in prohibitively expensive ‘renewable’ sources of energy,” concludes the Daily Express.

As for Al Gore, he just needs to tell us when the earth will start warming again—and why we should believe him again.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Al Gore returns to your TV screen in a 24-hour telethon September 14. He will presumably warn us about the lakes of molten lava that Mother Nature will pour upon us unless we agree to starve in the dark.

Unfortunately for Al, the evidence that our recent global warming is primarily natural just keeps piling up:

•The U.S. solar observatory is predicting an extending global cooling—perhaps 30 years long. At the same time NASA tells us the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cooling phase. That also predicts a 30-year global cooling.
•The computerized climate models failed to predict our current and persistent non-warming, leading the public to seriously question how the models can predict the climate in 2100 and beyond.
•The CERN experiment in Geneva endorsed Henrik Svensmark’s theory that the earth’s periodic abrupt-but-moderate climate changes are due to the sun’s variability—linked by clouds via cosmic rays.

The latest bad news for Gore? A satellite study says the East Antarctic Ice Cap, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, is expanding. The greenhouse theory clearly says the man-made warming “will start at the Polar Regions.” The satellites show the land-fast ice around the ice cap rose by a statistically significant 1.43 percent between 2000 and 2008.

Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally be explained.

Cosmic rays and solar winds are interesting phenomena—but they are vastly more relevant when an undocumented theory is threatening to quadruple society’s energy costs. The IPCC wants $10 gasoline, and “soaring” electric bills to reduce earth’s temperatures by an amount too tiny to measure with most thermometers.

In 2007, when Fred Singer and I published Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, we weren’t terribly concerned with cosmic rays. We knew the natural, moderate warming/cooling cycle was real, from the evidence in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. The cycle was the big factor that belied the man-made warming hysteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

CHURCHVILLE, VA - Is it the “Science Story of the Century” or the best kept American media secret of the year? Just-announced heavyweight new studies from the U.S. National Solar Observatory tell us to expect a long quiet period for the sun - and decades of cooler global temperatures.

The Register in London headlined, “Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade . . . which could mean that the Earth - far from facing a global warming problem - is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.”

Solar scientists are saying that as the sun goes quiet, the earth gets colder. Bloggers note that the Sporer (1460–1550), and the Maunder (1645–1715) sunspot minimums coincided with the two coldest spasms of the Little Ice Age. The Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) also produced colder temperatures.

The American media, however, would rather not encourage the public to expect cooling that would contradict the man-made warming scenario. After all, the 2012 election is coming soon, and President Obama is publicly committed to making energy prices “skyrocket” to “save the planet.” A long cooling trend now would tell us that all the billions spent subsidizing wind turbines, solar cells, and rare-earth lithium batteries represent a colossal waste - as the CO2 levels continue to rise with Asia’s economic growth.

Churchville, VA—A reader recently pointed out a fascinating temperature comparison—between 1700 AD and today. He marked two sections of the world’s oldest temperature record—Central England Yearly Average Temperature 1660–2008: The first section showed our famous recent temperature surge from 1976–1998. He also marked a similar strong temperature surge from AD 1688–1738.

The killer in the comparison is that the temperature surge after 1688 was followed by a sudden plunge into one of the coldest periods in the entire Little Ice Age! The cold of 1739-40 was called The Great Frost, and it devastated Europe from Italy to Iceland.

The linkage? The Great Frost followed a period of very few sunspots—the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715). Today, we know that fewer sunspots predict colder temperatures, and the modern world has just undergone a similar dearth of sunspots, from 2007 to 2011.

During the Maunder period, Europe’s glaciers were much larger than today; it was the Little Ice Age, after all. But the glaciers didn’t advance during the sunspot dearth. The winters of the 1730s were actually fairly warm. But during and after the winter of 1739, glaciers advanced strongly through France and Germany, and north into Sweden, Norway and Iceland and didn’t retreat for the next 50 years!

Updated below with MUST READ comments by Piers Corbyn