Our Myopic Scientists
This is not encouraging: Few now doubt global warming
Among scientists in two fields that focus closely on climate—geophysics and meteorology—few now doubt that the planet is warming or that human activity is to blame, even though views diverge on the dangers posed, says a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University.
Of the 489 Earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed by Harris Interactive, 97 percent said that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years, and 74 percent agreed that "currently available scientific evidence substantiates the occurrence of human-induced greenhouse warming." The findings mark a significant increase in concern over climate change since 1991, when a Gallup survey of the same universe of scientists showed only 60 percent agreed that temperatures were up and 41 percent believed that evidence pointed to human activity as the cause.
The scientists were about evenly divided on whether they thought the effects of global climate change over the next 50 to 100 years were likely to be near catastrophic (41 percent) or moderately dangerous (44 percent). About 13 percent saw relatively little danger. About 56 percent of the scientists said that global climate change was a mature science, while 39 percent termed it an emerging science.
The subservience of science to ideology is, more or less, now complete.
This couldn't have come at a worse time since we may be entering into an era of climate change that will actually put us into peril. Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
Here is the current photo of the sun discussed above:
Unlike a lot of the uncertain science behind the global warming hysteria, the connection of sunspot activity and solar cycles to earth's climate is well established. Unfortunately, in this day and age of pop media scrutiny, many scientists seem to be unwilling to challenge the "in crowd."
For that we might all suffer.
Environment | Rich Horton Wednesday, 23 April , 2008
By Mwalimu Daudi, Wednesday, 23 April , 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Of the 489 Earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed by Harris Interactive, 97 percent said that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years, and 74 percent agreed that "currently available scientific evidence substantiates the occurrence of human-induced greenhouse warming."
I would wait for independent confirmation before accepting this poll as accurate.
By Gary Gulrud, Thursday, 24 April , 2008 @ 3:35 pm
Earth Scientists, Climate Scientists (sic), farmers, enviornmentalists and politicians all have a vested interest in Global Warming. Only the farmers are betting their livelihood in the current furor. The remainder all win regardless of the outcome with the inexorable "Climate Change".
The facts are that the sun is approaching the bottom of a 190 year Gleissberg cycle of activity and will be so for at least a few decades. A terrestrial ocean cycle, the PDO is flipping to a negative mode, producing the current La Nina weather and these conditions will prevail 60% of the time for the next 3 decades. During this period and beyond cloudiness will be more common than at any time in US history as the earth’s magnetic field continues to decline as it has over the last century and a half.
In a decade conditions will be ideal for a recurrence of cyclic drought in the corn belt (last seen in the 1930s) as another ocean cycle, the AMO enters its cool cycle. Northern wheat fields will simultaneously see a decline in degree days approaching 10%. Our centrally planned Ethanol economy, will be hitting its stride and aquifers will begin to fail in alarming fashion. World famine will be more widespread that at any time in living memory. In the US, the 1970’s will seem like a time of stability and plenty, as world unrest tears lives elsewhere asunder.
Mark it down.