A huge fuss was made in early 2002, when the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica broke up into a mosaic of icebergs; but nothing about it's being part of a peninsula that projects into open water that isn't even inside the Antarctic Circle—where such an event is inevitable and had been expected—or that the remaining 98 percent of the continent had been steadily cooling and accumulating ice. In October 1998 an iceberg the size of Delaware—92 miles long and 30 miles wide—broke off from Antarctica and was described by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as "a possible indicator of global warming." But The American Navigator, a prestigious naval text updated annually since 1799, reports in 1854 a crescent-shaped iceberg in the South Atlantic with horns 40 and 60 miles long, and 40 miles separating the tips; in 1927, a berg 100 miles long by 100 miles wide. In 1956 a U.S. Navy icebreaker reported one 60 miles wide by 208 miles long—more than twice the size of Connecticut. A federal agency was unable to ascertain this? Or was its public-relations policy driven by politically correct ideology?
But the biggest fact that refutes the whole thing is that the 0.5oC warming that occurred over the twentieth century took place before 1940, while 80 percent of the increase in CO2 didn't happen until afterward, with the rapid industrialization worldwide that followed World War II. Not even by environmentalist logic can an effect come before the cause that was supposed to have produced it. The complete lack of correlation is clear. In fact, from 1940 to the mid seventies, when the buildup in CO2 was accelerating, global temperatures actually fell. The dire warnings that were being dispensed then, couched in virtually the same language that we hear today, were that the Earth was facing an imminent ice age. Science, March 1, 1975, announced that the Earth had better prepare for "a full-blown, 10,000-year ice age." Newsweek, April 28, declared that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down [which would] reduce agricultural production for the rest of the century." International Wildlife in July of the same year agreed that "A new ice age must stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery." The cause? Industry, of course, by releasing smoke and other particulates into the atmosphere, cutting down incoming solar radiation. The cure? Drastic restrictions enforced through international action, more controls, higher taxes to pay for it all. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
And then from about 1970 to the present we've seen a rise back to less than 0.1oC above 1940. Just when the predicted increase should have been greatest according to the C02 models, temperatures since around 1980 have actually declined.
But the 0.5oC Net Rise Is Still There:
If the CO2 Increase Didn't Do It, What Did?
Well, one of the most compelling correlations with the temperature rise of 0.5oC from 1890 to 1940, the fall of 0.2oC to 1970, the recovery to 1990, and a leveling since then turns out to be with the length of the nominally eleven-year sunspot cycle. When the Sun is more active the Earth is warmer, and vice versa. The tail end of a decreasing curve from around 1870 to 1890 also matches, but before then the data become imprecise. Overall, in the course of the twentieth century the Sun's brightness seems to have increased by about 0.1 percent.
The suggestion that changes in solar radiation might have a significant effect on the Earth's climate seems a pretty reasonable, if not obvious one, but until recently most scientists apparently dismissed such evidence as "coincidences" because it simply wasn't fashionable to think of the Sun's output as varying. In 1801, the astronomer William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, hypothesized that times when many sunspots were observed would mean a greater emission of heat and hence mild seasons, while times of few sunspots would signal less heat and severe seasons. Since he lacked an accurate record of temperature measurements to check his theory he suggested using the price of wheat as an indicator instead, but was generally ridiculed. But it turns out that periods of low sunspot activity in his times are indeed associated with high wheat prices.
By the early 1990s enough had been published for the primacy of the solar-climate connection to be gaining general acceptance, or at least, serious consideration (outside the world of global warming advocacy, that is). The way the mechanism seems to work is that sunspots are produced during periods of high solar magnetic activity, which is carried outward by the solar wind enveloping the Earth. This solar field acts as a shield to deflect incoming cosmic rays (primarily high-energy protons and helium nuclei) from reaching the Earth's surface. (The curves of sunspot activity and neutron counts from upper-atmosphere cosmic ray collisions show a close inverse correlation on a cycle that varies around eleven years.) The ionizing effects of cosmic rays has a great influence on cloud formation—again the curves match almost perfectly—meaning that at times of solar maximum, cloud cover diminishes and the Earth becomes warmer.
Reconstructions of earlier times show the pattern as extending back to long before any human industrial activity existed. 151 The net 0.1 percent solar brightening and 0.5oC mean temperature rise that took place through the twentieth century was the last phase of a general warming that has been going on since early in the eighteenth century, a time known as the Little Ice Age, when the Thames river in England froze regularly in winter with ice thick enough for fairs to be held on it. This was also the period that astronomers refer to as the "Maunder Minimum" of solar activity, with sunspots virtually disappearing. R. D. Blackmore's novel Lorna Doone tells that in the winter of 1683–4, trees in Somerset could be heard bursting from the cold.
The cooling that reached its low point in the Little Ice Age had begun around 1300. Before then there had been a warm period of several centuries centered around 1100, known as the "medieval climate optimum." This was a time when Greenland was indeed green, and the Vikings established farms and settlements there. (There's evidence that they explored into North America as well. Markers that they used to denote their day's travel have been found mapping a trail southward from Hudson Bay into Minnesota.) This in turn is revealed as being part of an approximately 2,500-year-long cycle of greater temperature swings. It reached a low just before 3,000 years ago, and before that peaked between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, being as high above today's global mean as the Little Ice Age was below it. This was when forests and herd animals numbering millions thrived across what today are barren Siberian tundra, the Sahara was green and traversed by rivers, and the plains of Europe and North America resembled safari parks. None of this was due to fossil-fuel power plants or refrigeration industries operated by the Vikings or Paleolithic village dwellers.
This longer-term variation could have had something to do with several distinct cycles that have been identified with respect to the relationship between the Sun and the Earth, primarily from the work of Miliutin Milankovitch (1920). The ones he studied were first, the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes, resulting from the slow wobble of the Earth's axis; a 40,000-year variation in the tilt of the axis; and a 90,000 to 100,000 change in the eccentricity of the orbit. When the ascending portions of these cycles fall into phase, as is claimed to be the case at present, their effects add. Although this line of explanation has been challenged by catastrophist interpretations that reject such long-term constancy, 153 the general basis is agreed for cosmic events outside the Earth being the prime determinants of climatic changes.
And yes, the global warmers are correct in their insistence on a connection between temperature and carbon dioxide levels. The records from ice cores, isotope ratios in the shells of marine fossils, growth ring patterns in trees, and so forth show that at times when temperatures were high, carbon dioxide levels were high, and vice versa. But they get the order the wrong way around. Detailed analysis of the timings shows consistently that the temperature changes come first, with the CO2 increases following after a lag of typically forty to fifty years—just as has happened recently. 154 Although in the latter instance the CO2 rise is conventionally attributed to human activities, before accepting it as the final word or the whole explanation, let's be aware that the Earth possesses enormous reser
voirs of carbon in various forms that would find ready release into the atmosphere given even a mild rise in atmospheric and ocean temperature. The frozen soil and permafrost of the polar regions contain carbonates and organic matter that will be reemitted as carbon dioxide upon thawing and melting. Peat, the great Irish fossil-fuel contribution, occurs in a huge belt around the Arctic, passing through Greenland and Labrador, across Canada and Alaska, through Siberia and Scandinavia to the British Isles. It can reach thirty or forty feet in depth, and two million tons of dried fuel can be extracted from a square mile, almost three quarters of it carbon. The oxygenation of this material as air permeated downward after the thawing of a overlying permafrost layer would produce more CO2.
A final source worth mentioning are methyl hydrate deposits, estimated at 2,000 billion tons contained in tundra and as much as 100,000 billion tons in ocean sediments. 155 Raising the ocean temperature just a few degrees would cause this source to release methane at the rate of 8 billion tons per year—a greenhouse gas 50 times more effective than CO2. This is equivalent to eight times all the fossil fuel burned in the hundred years from 1850 to 1950.
Global Greening
All this suggests that in the warmer epochs that have occurred in the past, CO2 levels must have been a lot higher than those that are causing the hysteria today. And so they were. The concentration 100 million years ago is estimated to have been 3,000–5,000 ppm against today's paltry 350. 156 And the biosphere thrived. Carbon dioxide is the most basic of plant foods, after all; and it's the plants that we and everything else depend on. Most of the plants on this planet can't survive below CO2 concentrations in the range 50–100 ppm. During the coldest part of the last ice age the content of the atmosphere fell to around 180 ppm—perilously close to the extinction threshold for practically everything above microbes. Outside the make-believe world of computer models, there's actually more evidence over the longer term for cooling rather than warming, and as a number of scientists have remarked, the warm periods between glacials seem to last about 11,000 years, and we're 10,800 years into the current one. Sherwood B. Idso, a research physicist at the Water Conservation Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, argues that flooding the atmosphere with CO2 could be just about the best thing we could do right now—our "one good deed for the other life forms with which we share the planet." 157
Given the conditions that prevailed in past epochs, plants ought to be better adapted to higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2 than the level that exists today. And this turns out to be exceedingly true. Field and laboratory experiments show that a simple doubling of the air's CO:2 content increases plant yield by about a third, at the same time reducing evaporation and doubling the efficiency of water use. Sour orange trees planted as seedlings in open-top enclosures supplied with an extra 300 ppm CO2 almost tripled in biomass compared to untreated controls. Hence, biologists refer to the process as "enrichment," and commercial agriculturalists, who apply the technique routinely in growing houses, as "aerial fertilization." (This didn't stop a member of the Canadian House of Commons from speaking of it as a poison gas. 158 Which about sums up the scientific literacy of the captains we entrust the ship to.)
But that's only the beginning of the good news, for the rate of improvement continues itself improving all the way out to CO2 concentrations of 1,000 ppm or more. And unlike the signs of warming that the doomsday advocates seek desperately to tease out of spiky thickets of data points, or see in every above-average month of heat or below-average month of rainfall, there could already be very clear fingerprints of a different kind telling of the CO2 increase that we are unquestionably experiencing. Standing timber in the United States has increased by 30 percent since 1950, and tree-ring studies confirm a spectacular increase in growth rates. Mature Amazon rain forests are increasing in biomass by about two tons per acre per year. 159
The transformation this could bring to our partly frozen, largely desertified planet could be stupefying. It would mean a return of forests and grasslands to vast areas that are currently wastes, with all the concomitant benefits of cycling greater amounts of organic matter back to the soil, increased populations of microorganisms, deeper rooting systems capable of mining nutrients from greater depths, greater penetration, purifying, and circulation of water, all leading toward greater size and diversity of the animal populations that the system supports—in short, a proliferation of the kind of ecological richness that we associate with rain forests. It is quite conceivable that such "bootstrapping" of the biosphere could result in a tenfold increase in the totality of Earth's bioprocesses.
The Bandwagon Rolls Regardless
But little of this finds its way to the public through the agencies that are generally considered to be entrusted with informing the public. What the public hears is a litany of repetitions that scientists are in agreement on the imminence of a global calamity, accompanied by the spectacle of a political circus bent on foisting the canon that any delay beyond taking drastic action now could be too late. With the exception of the Wall Street Journal, none of the mass media mentioned the Heidelberg Appeal, signed initially by 218 leading scientists including 27 Nobel Prize winners in April 1992, after the "Earth Summit" in Rio, as a condemnation of irrational ideologies opposed to scientific and industrial progress. By the fall of that year the number of signatories had grown to 500 scientists, including 62 Nobel Prize winners, and by 1997, S. Fred Singer, who heads the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Washington D.C., reported the figures as 4,000 and 70 respectively. 160 Nor do the media publicize the Leipzig Declaration, based on an international symposium held in Germany in November 1995, which contains the statements "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming" and "we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired worldview that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions." This was reissued in 1997 prior to the climate treaty conference due to be held in Kyoto in December, signed by almost a hundred atmospheric specialists, and carried the caveat "we consider the drastic emission control policies likely to be endorsed by the Kyoto conference—lacking credible support from the underlying science—to be ill-advised and premature." 161
Instead, the world was told there was a virtually unanimous scientific consensus on the existence of a clear and present danger. On July 24, 1997, President Clinton held a press conference at which he announced that the catastrophic effects of man's use of fossil fuels was now an accepted scientific fact, not a theory. To underline this, he produced a list stated as being of 2,500 scientists who had approved the 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report preparing the ground for Kyoto. That sounded conclusive, and most of the world at large accepted it as such.
However, upon further delving, things turn out to be not quite that simple. For a start, by far the majority of the signers were not climate scientists but political representatives from their respective countries, ranging all the way from Albania to Zimbabwe, with degrees in the social sciences. Their listing as "contributors" meant, for example, that they might have been given a part of the report and asked to express an opinion, and even if the opinion was a negative one they were still listed as "reviewers." 162 Only seventy-eight of the attendees were involved in producing the document. Even then, to give it even a hint of supporting the global warming position, the executive summary, written by a small IPCC steering group, was purged of all politically incorrect skepticism and modified—after the scientists had signed it!—which caused an uproar of indignation from the qualified atmospheric specialists who participated. 163
Fred Singer later produced a paper entitled "The Road from Rio to Kyoto: How Climatic Science was Distorted to Support Ideological Objectives," which couldn't have put it much more clearly. 164 The IPCC report stated the twentieth century to have been the warmest in six hundred years of climate history. Although correct, this avoided any mention of the Little Ice Age that the twentieth century was a recovery fr
om, while going back just a little further would have brought in the "medieval optimum," which was warmer than today. Another part of the report told that increases in carbon dioxide in the geological past were "associated with" increases in temperature. This is disingenuous in that it obviously aims at giving the impression that the CO2 increases caused the temperature rises, whereas, as we've seen, the temperature rises came first. If any causation was involved, there are stronger reasons for supposing it to have been in the opposite direction.
These are just two of twelve distortions that Singer's paper discusses, but they give the general flavor. Two phrases edited out of the IPCC report were, "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best answer is, 'we do not know.' "
Frederick Seitz, former head of the National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, wrote (Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996), "But this report is not what it appears to be—it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. . . . I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." Yet a year later it was being cited as proof of a consensus by the scientific community.
Kicking the Sacred Cow Page 27
