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Punctuations:
Futurist John L. Petersen looks into Earth Changes
There are very good reasons to believe there
are direct correlations between the general state of the sun and our climate and
between the specific sunspot and coronal discharges and our weather.
 Comment
09/05/2010 03:37 AM CST
(TAI.org) -- In the last issue of FUTUREdition I made
mention of Mitch Battros' book, Solar Rain which, published in 2005, made note
of significant shortcomings in the collection of the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) data which underpins almost all of the notions
that most people and governments have about climate change. That common
perspective is that the earth is getting warmer and that human activity is an
important contributing factor to that escalation. It's known as AGW,
anthropomorphic global warming. Essentially all national initiatives and
policies related to reducing CO2 and carbon trading and sequestration are based
upon IPCC data and pronouncements.
Battros said, (remember, this is five years ago), quoting from an article in the
journal, Geophysical Research Letters:
Many teams have tried to independently replicate the above (hockey stick)
chart, but none has succeeded, yet the IPCC inexplicably accepted the theory as
scientific fact.
One of the article's authors asked Professor Michael Mann (one of the
principal authors of the hockey stick chart) for his original data and was told,
"We've forgotten where we put it." The IPCC never actually verified the data.
Mann has been vague and evasive on which "proxies," such as tree rings, he
used. Initially it was 112, but then in 2003, Mann suddenly increased the number
to 159.
When asked, Mann refused to provide the original computer code for his
model, but McIntyre (one of the authors) found evidence that Mann had worked
backwards from the hockey stick graph to determine which tree rings to select.
Climatologists know for a fact that
the weather in the 15th century was actually warmer than in the 20th century,
but Mann's model completely ignores it.
Every time I have mentioned the possible problem with this data and the
implications that have been drawn from it I have received communications from
well-meaning friends and
FUTUREdition readers imploring me to be more "balanced"
in dealing with the subject. Some folks have cancelled their subscription to
this newsletter because I raised these issues, suggesting that I was a "denier"
of the obvious indications that the world was warming and that if we all didn't
do something about it -- fast -- that humanity itself was threatened.
Well, now it turns out that all of those allegations (and even more data
manipulations) were quite true and even worse, some "threats" -- like the
supposed fact that Himalayan glaciers would all be melted by about 2030 putting
at risk the lives of billions of downstream Asians -- were just made up . . . in
order to generate funding for the author's (and many other scientists')
projects.
Please read this
article from
the IMVA Medical News which
reports that "Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the "Climategate"
affair, conceded that there has been no "statistically significant" rise in
temperatures since 1995.
"Jones, the former director of the Climate Research Unit
(CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia, admitted to the BBC in February of
2010 not only the statistics but stated that from January 2002 to the present,
the earth has been cooling and that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from 800 to
1300 A.D., did in fact exist; a scientifically accepted fact that Jones and
other climate researchers tried to discount or hide."
But the glaciers are melting, you say. Yes, there are some places that are
warmer than they have been and some glaciers are indeed melting, but there are
also many major places that are significantly colder (read the article at the
link) and other glaciers that are rapidly expanding. On the average, the global
temperature has not changed.
What's also interesting about this piece is that it echoes Mitch Battros's
notion that this climate shift is being greatly influenced by the sun.
"Climate is changing much faster, stronger and sooner than
anyone expected and it is changing in unexpected ways. It is supposed to be
warming but the reality is actually cooling. Sami K. Solanki of the Max Planck
Institute for Solar System Research announced that he believes the Sun is
leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the
20th century. He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second
half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years. Solanki holds that a
repeat of the Dalton Minimum is most likely, and that the earth is in for an
unusually deep and long solar minimum. The sun is cycling through its own solar
minimum phase and naturally when things calm down in terms of solar radiation,
things tend to cool, not warm."
Good friends have sent me this
video,
which purports to debunk the "deniers". It features many indications of weather (not
climate) and says that this indicates that the planet is warming. Weather, by
definition, is short-term, and one or two months of warmer (or colder) weather
can never be an accurate indication of what the global climate is doing. Look at
the significant disparity in the underlying data points in the graphs that are
shown. One scientist talks about his global climatic model that he implies
predicts what the global weather is likely to be in 90 years (at the end of the
century). Do you really believe that we have computer models that can predict
what the climate might be almost a century from now? Since our models certainly
didn't anticipate the unusual weather that we are experiencing now, it takes a
significant amount of hubris to believe that we understand what the climate
might be that many decades from now.
I think it is vitally important to contextualize all of this:
- If you think that science is without politics and is
always practiced by individuals who are upstanding, honest and have high
integrity - then you have not read much on the history of science. Science
is hugely influenced by the availability of funding and the politics are
extraordinarily brutal. And by the way, much of what we think we know will
be proven wrong in time. That's how it works.
- None of these models nor the scientists defending their theories of
warming reference the effects of the sun on our climate. There are very good
reasons to believe there are direct correlations between the general state
of the sun and our climate and between the specific sunspot and coronal
discharges and our weather. That idea is slowly working its way into the
system of scientific knowledge. When it continues to get colder, that
perspective will be harder to ignore.
Please don't get me wrong about all of this. Let me quickly and emphatically
say that I really think we should be cleaning up the place and finding new,
clean sources of energy. It's inevitable that we will need new sources and the
time is right to rapidly move in that direction. Personally, I'm involved in a
number of new energy projects, each of which has the potential to significantly
change the world - so I'm very much for new, clean energy.
At the same time, I also believe that honesty, integrity, truth, and common
sense - virtues that seem to be increasingly in short supply these days - are
really central to any healthy society.
This article is reproduced at STARpod.org / STARstream
Research by permission of John L. Petersen.
For more information, please visit
The Arlington Institute.
Copyright (c) 2010 by John L. Petersen and The Arlington Institute -- All
rights reserved.
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