Are We Melting Yet?

The man-made global warming/climate change crowd never went away in spite of evidence to the contrary – they just got more persistent, more creative with their scaremongering, and enlisted new and less known long-time die-hard supporters.

During the week of August 6-10, 2012,  the Washington Post published four articles on the topic, “Climate change blamed for drought,” “Climate change is here and worse than we thought,” “In a cold place, warming is most evident,” and “On Alaskan coast, the ancient ways are melting away.” Interestingly, all four articles quote each other and the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

James E. Hansen “painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels” when he testified before the Senate in 1988. His evidence is “not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened.”

Hansen’s analysis “shows that for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.” I am not a scientist but I believe that I read somewhere that increased activity of solar flares and variables such as volcanic activity are possible variables responsible for hot weather or violent storm occurrences.

Hansen believes that extreme weather events are not just examples of “what climate change could bring.  They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are miniscule, vanishingly small.”

The famous University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations around the globe, confirmed that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997. (Daily Mail, January 29, 2012)

Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology believes that factors other than CO2 are variables in the rising and falling of heat wave incidents, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. “They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,” said Judith Curry.

The sun has emitted high levels of energy during most of the 20^th century and is now “heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of season available for growing food.”

Solar output follows 11-year cycles with a higher number of sunspots at a cycle’s peak. Experts at NASA and the University of Arizona have suggested that cycle 25 will peak in 2022 weakly. Their readings come from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface.

Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute, believes that “world temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more. It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.”

A paper on extreme weather published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by James E. Hansen, Makiko Sato of NASA, the Columbia University Earth Institute, and Reto Ruedy of Trinnovim (provides support for NASA) hypothesized that extreme weather events would not occur without global warming. They defined weather anomalies as “three standard deviations from statistical history” based on 2006-2011data. 

John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville critiqued Hanson’s conclusions - if he had picked a longer period of time to study anomalies such as Texas heat waves in 1950 and the Dust Bowl of 1930, he would have found no extreme differences. (Mark Drajem, the Washington Post, August 7, 2012)

Liberal environmentalists say that our carbon footprint and greenhouse gases have changed the world and now we have to suffer. James E. Hansen has the perfect solution. He proposes in the Washington Post a “gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs.”

Would these new jobs be like the green jobs that never materialized in the last four years? Would the jobs involve the manufacturing and installation of windmills and solar panels? Would this clean-energy economy include companies like Solyndra and other 12 renewable energy companies that had gone bankrupt after spending billions of taxpayer dollars from the generous ongoing Department of Energy backed loans? Would we have to change our current standard of living to the “simpler life” of the 19^th century, pre-industrial development, walking and biking, as advocated by the green movement?