by Will Hart

extracted from The Anomalist-11

Summer 2003

from Scribd Website

An article from the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek titled “The Cooling World” (click below image) makes for fascinating reading. It becomes very clear that the great weather debate has been with us for some time.

But we seem to forget how quickly the issues and forecasts get completely turned around. In the mid 1970s scientists were worried about a cooling trend,

“In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950...”

This brings up an intriguing point that most of today’s journalists reporting on global warming seem to have missed.

The so-called “global warming” that is being alleged to have occurred over the past century is a myth. The warming trend occurred between 1900 and 1940 that was then replaced by colder weather.

The article reported that a survey completed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),

“reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.”

The article went on to mention the “little ice age” that took place from the 16th to the middle of the 19th centuries and the stark fact,

“just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery.”

The last 1000 years underscores just how complex the alternating weather cycles really are.

In 987 A.D, Erik the Red sailed to Greenland with a band of Vikings to escape punishment for the crime of manslaughter. It was not known to be a hospitable climate, the ice sheet was usually very thick. But the Vikings got lucky: things had changed during a global warm spell and Erik established two farming settlements where the ice had formerly been.

That time is known as the Medieval Warm Period. It lasted about four hundred years and raised average temperatures from 2 to 3 degrees above today’s levels. Sea ice off the coast of Iceland nearly vanished. Eskimos settled in the normally frigid Ellesmere Island off the Northwest coast of Greenland. In the Rocky Mountains the snow level was pushed 1,000 feet above where it is today.

But this warm spell ended and a cycle of frigid weather replaced it.

The “little ice age” set its icy grip on the world in the 15th and 16th centuries. Historical records in Great Britain and China complain of vintners having to relocate their vineyards 300 miles south of where they had been and orange groves that had suddenly been killed by hard frosts. By 1700 Iceland was surrounded by sea ice again.

The “little ice age” lasted until the middle of the 19th century.

It seems that we should perhaps be thankful that we got a brief 100-year respite from the deep freeze instead of bemoaning “global warming” as if it portended the end of the world. What about this global warming forecast? It all began in the 1980s when a couple of scientists put the warming trend that occurred the first half of the century together with a 40-year buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and came up with the famous “greenhouse effect.”

The rising CO² levels - it was theorized - would continue to increase, raising global temperatures, which would melt the polar caps, push the sea levels up and inundate coastal cities. This weather-Armageddon scenario made for a great sound-byte. It was the type of story that Hollywood could turn into a “based on real facts” made for TV movie.

The hypothesis soon turned into established science, at least according to its promoters, and it became the daily bread of the mass media throughout the 1990s (and still is).

Critics were simply ignored. Then a funny thing happened in the fall of 2001. NASA released the results of their study of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for the last decade of the 20th century. The global warming camp was shocked into silence. There was no CO² buildup! It had been promised since the mid-1980s.

However, the Earth’s land-based ecosystems absorbed all the naturally produced carbon dioxide plus 1.4 billion tons that humanity produced. The media published this report but never made mention of it being the cornerstone prediction of the “global warming” theory. Interesting.

By this time several international conferences had been convened and policies were agreed upon primarily aimed at dealing with the “greenhouse effect” and “global warming,” which were nothing more than scientific speculation run amok. This would soon be confirmed by several more reports released in 2001 and early 2002.

The November issue of Science contained this head-scratching piece of news for global warmers:

“We noted in the last issue that Antarctic sea ice has been thickening substantially for the past two years. Now we notice a scientific study published last spring that indicates this is a longer-term phenomenon.

 

A study published in the April 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters finds that sea ice in Antarctica has been increasing rather than decreasing from October 1987 to September 1999…”

A paper titled “Antarctic Climate Cooling and Terrestrial Ecosystem Response” recently appeared on Nature’s web site:

“Climate models generally predict amplified warming in polar regions… Although previous reports suggest slight recent continental warming, our spatial analysis of Antarctic meteorological data demonstrates a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000…”

The scientists who are shouting the loudest about warming trends at the South Pole, who seem to have the media’s ear, are studying a strip of land on the Antarctic Peninsula, not the western ice sheet or the interior valleys.

On January 14, 2002 the Washington Post reported,

“…scientists have found that temperatures on the Antarctic continent have fallen steadily for more than two decades.”

Other major U.S. papers failed to pick up this story.

Would we be too forthright to ask why? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the major media has been reporting that there is a worldwide consensus among scientists that “global warming” is a done deal?

We will find more compelling evidence to the contrary, but do not expect to see it covered with same “white heat” that global warming has been for two decades.

Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich Switzerland. The Nisqually glacier on Mount Rainer is the most well documented glacier in the U.S. Records, kept since the mid-1800s, show that it has been advancing since 1931.

Weather stations in the Alps and Nordic countries show a 1°C decline since 1930.

Geologists exploring Rocky Mountain National Park discovered 100 new glaciers last summer.

“The results dramatically changed the map of one of the nation’s oldest and best-known parks… Previously, officials believed the park 60 miles NW of Denver, included 20 permanent ice and snow features, including 6 named glaciers.”

(AP, 2001)

In Patagonia, the Mount Moreno glacier is expanding. These reports may come as a surprise because all we seem to hear about are the glaciers and ice features that are melting.

What about this consensus among scientists?

A 1992 Gallup survey of climatologists found that 81 percent believed that the global temperature had not risen over the past 100 years, were uncertain whether or why such warming had occurred, or believed any temperatures increases during that period were within the natural range of variation. What consensus has the media been referring to we might ask?

According to Accu-Weather the world’s leading commercial forecaster,

“Global air temperatures as measured by land-based weather stations show an increase of about 0.45° Celsius over the past century. This may be no more than normal climatic variation…[and] several biases in the data may be responsible for some of this increase.”

Average global temperatures can be very misleading since many of the readings are taken around major metro areas that are known to be “heat islands.” Satellite data, which is not subject to any local ground-based distortion, indicate a slight cooling over the past 18 years.

The Polar Regions and the tops of high mountains around the world are the precursors to a coming cooling period as Lawrence Hetcht noted in an article titled “Is a New Ice Age Underway?” in an issue of 21st Science and Technology Magazine:

“The significance of the fact, immediately grasped by any competent climatologist, is that glacial advance is an early warning of Northern Hemisphere chilling of the sort that can bring on an Ice Age.”

Now let us interject and interpose the data and the historical context that the “global warmers” leave out of their scenario: We are about 10,500 years into an interglacial warming period.

It has been punctuated by several “mini ice ages” but on the whole the Earth has been warming and the ice sheets thinning and the glaciers melting since the end of the last Great Ice Age. The long-term climate models clearly show oscillations between alternating ice ages and interglacials. The current warm trend has already lasted longer than previous ones.

Can we say with any certainty that the “mini ice age” that started in the 15th century was not the beginning of the next Big Ice Age?

It only ended in 1850 when the industrial revolution was underway adding CO² to the atmosphere. In his article Hecht notes that,

“Our current understanding of the long-term weather cycles shows that for the past 800,000 years, periods of approximately 100,000 years duration, called Ice Ages, have been interrupted by periods of approximately 10,000 years, known as interglacials. (We are now 10,500 years into an interglacial.)”

Admittedly, this is a complex set of cycles with many variables, however the graphs of ice core studies show a fairly predictable pattern geared, not to CO² levels, but to the Earth’s tilt, precession and the fluctuations of solar radiation reaching the Earth.

The 100,000- year Ice Age is a convergence of 41,000 year and 26,000 cycles. They are complex but not chaotic. These patterns are very precise and have been rigorously studied and established.

We have to keep three concepts in mind: cycles, trends and momentum. We are in the latter stages of an interglacial according to the long-term climate models.

About 18,000 years ago the last Ice Age was at its peak. Vast ice sheets covered the Northern Hemisphere. Sea levels were about 300-feet lower than today. An Ice Age gains momentum and feeds on itself as the albedo effect reflects incoming solar radiation back to space, the oceans also cool and the Polar seas freeze and the summers get colder and colder.

The opposite happens in an interglacial.

The ice sheets disappear, the land holds in more heat and the ocean warms, melting glaciers and raising sea levels. Now 10 millennia into that process all that we see are the warming cycle, the trends and momentum of the interglacial epoch. But isn’t this how a cyclical phenomena with a trend operates? Every waveform has a peak and a trough. Just as the trend seems to be manifesting some stability it dissolves and reverses polarity.

And it is just like people to start believing the trend is permanent just before the reversal.

That is exactly how the Stock Market operates and why most investors lose their shirts. Global warmers have tried to make a case that the Greenland ice sheet has been melting, but the results of the research show inconsistencies between the western and eastern ice sheets: one is expanding, the other contracting.

Greenland was actually another land mass that bucked the alleged “global warming” trends by,

“ending the century slightly cooler than it began,” according to Phillip Huybrechts, a climate researcher from the University of Brussels.

Dr. David Deming of the University of Oklahoma points out that Earth’s average temperature was higher than at present for 7,500 of the past 10,000 years. The only “global warming” we are experiencing is in relation to the last “little ice age” we have been coming out of.

So what then, we may wonder, is the danger of a little rise in the global temperature, if it were indeed happening?

But that is a moot point because there is no solid evidence to support the theory and the failure of the CO² prediction based on the greenhouse model is the first solid evidence against the scenario.

This is troubling because it points up a fact that many people are becoming aware of: science and the mass media have been operating in a very unscientific way by making ludicrous proclamations and statements that sound more like the Psychic Hotline than what we should expect from our key scientific and journalistic institutions.

What happened to the rules of objectivity and evidence?

This is bad forecast in more ways than one…