Perhaps the silliest thing about the modern global warming debate is that we’re trying to evaluate major climate changes in eye-blinks of time such as 10 or 30 years. The big Ice Age cycle lasts about 90,000 years, the last one ended about 12,000 years ago. El Ninos last a year or two and change nothing, climate-wise. The Weather Channel can (sort of) predict ten days out.

Yet the UN panel’s claims of man-made warming are based on an “unprecedented warming” that was only 22 years long, 1976–1998. There’s been no trace of a warming trend since. There was, however, an earlier “unprecedented warming” from 1915–1940—before the Industrial Revolution started seriously raising the C02 levels.

At the moment, the alarmists are frantically predicting that the Arctic will become ice-free any minute now, all the polar bears will starve, and we’ll be sorry we didn’t listen. The Russians, however, say the Arctic region has recently been about at the peak warmth of its own 70-year climate cycle—and the Russians know the Arctic. There are, additionally, lots of old news stories in the New York Times files that made the same “unprecedented” claims about Arctic melting in the 1920s and 30s. Let’s also remember that there are two Poles and the Antarctic has been building ice for the last 40 years.

Today, we’d like to settle the Arctic question once and for all—based on research that has been before us for years. First, let’s agree that geologists and climatologists have the evidence of long-term changes in the earth’s past temperatures. Geologist Ian Plimer, in his book, Heaven and Earth, notes that the first global warming during our Holocene, between 9,000 and 6500 BC, was the warmest earth has been since the end of the last big Ice Age.

A Norwegian research team three years ago announced it had found important evidence of an ice-free Arctic during that first Holocene warming. “The climate in the northern regions has never been milder since the last Ice Age than it was about 6000–7000 years ago,” says Astrid Lysa, one of the Norwegian geologists.

Dr. Lysa and Eiliv Larsen, of the Geological Survey of Norway, studied beach ridges on the northern shores of Greenland. They found distinct, very long beach ridges, running parallel to the beach, which dated back to 6000–7000 years BC. They say these ridges were formed when there was wave activity and occasional storms–on a big body of water with little or no ice. The research team says pack ice ridges are shorter, narrower and more irregular. The Norwegian team says the sea levels haven’t been as high since, because the ice hasn’t all melted since. Otherwise, new waves would have washed the older ridges away

If the Arctic was nearly ice-free in the first Holocene Warm Period, did the seals disappear? Did the polar bears starve? If they had, there’d be no polar bears up there today, since they aren’t migratory.

Lysa and Larsen say there are pack ice ridges farther down the beach, Carbon dating shows this Arctic pack ice had re-formed by 4000 years ago. There is also evidence that Inuit hunters had migrated to the northern beaches by that time. These seal-hunting people had to have both pack ice, and driftwood.

“Seals and driftwood were absolutely vital if they were to survive, says Larsen. “They needed seals for food and clothing, and driftwood for fuel when the temperature crept towards minus 50 degrees.”

There you have it. The Arctic has been ice-free or nearly ice-free in the climatically recent past. So much for “unprecedented warmth” in today’s Arctic, so much for the polar bears going extinct. However, I will concede that climate cycling is so complex it would be much simpler to just blame humans.

Al Gore returns to your TV screen in a 24-hour telethon September 14. He will presumably warn us about the lakes of molten lava that Mother Nature will pour upon us unless we agree to starve in the dark. .

Unfortunately for Al, the evidence that our recent global warming is primarily natural just keeps piling up:

The U.S. solar observatory is predicting an extending global cooling—perhaps 30 years long. At the same time NASA tells us the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cooling phase. That also predicts a 30-year global cooling.
The computerized climate models failed to predict our current and persistent non-warming, leading the public to seriously question how the models can predict the climate in 2100 and beyond.
The CERN experiment in Geneva endorsed Henrik Svensmark’s theory that the earth’s periodic abrupt-but-moderate climate changes are due to the sun’s variability—linked by clouds via cosmic rays.

The latest bad news for Gore? A satellite study says the East Antarctic Ice Cap, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, is expanding. The greenhouse theory clearly says the man-made warming “will start at the Polar Regions.” The satellites show the land-fast ice around the ice cap rose by a statistically significant 1.43 percent between 2000 and 2008.

But never mind all these trivial facts: Scientific American offers us “proof” of the man-made warming dangers—demonstrated just 56 million years ago in the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum! That’s when the single supercontinent, Pangaea, was ripped apart by plate tectonic shifts. Scientific American portrays this as a big release of CO2—but red-hot molten lava and superheat from the earth’s inner core were also venting almost directly into the atmosphere.

So—if we release a lot of CO2 and molten lava into our air, bad things will happen. Ditto if we tear one of our continents apart. A neighbor of mine showed me this article, saying, “This made me more afraid than I’ve ever been before.”

Is our North American continent being torn open by plate tectonics and Al Gore didn’t tell me? I admit being surprised by the earthquake that hit my Virginia home recently, but we only had two teacups broken. The Washington Post said nothing about ripping North America a new coastline filled with molten lava.

If we’re going back into climate history, why go back 56 million years?  We only have to go back to 1850 to find the end of the Little Ice Age and the beginning of the Modern Warming. That shift came too early to blame on auto exhausts.

Through ice cores and fossil pollen, we can look back to AD 1000—when the Medieval Warming doubled the world’s human population. How? The long, sunny summers and stable climate doubled food production after the cold and violent climate of the Dark Ages. For a million years, the global warmings have been the “good times.”

We could look at 2100 BC, when the climate evidence shows a “little ice age” hit King Sargon’s Akkadian empire, in today’s Iraq. There was a 300-year drought, interspersed with violent floods. The Akkadians starved. Violent nomads roamed the land.

One of the real experts on the Akkadian disaster is Dr. Heidi Cullen, late of the Weather Channel. Heidi personally dug up the evidence of six solar-driven climate cycles whose cooling phases repeatedly destroyed the cities of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley for centuries at a time. The cities were always rebuilt during the global warmings. Her paper was published in Geology in 2000.  Heidi tells us to “follow the science.”  I’m willing because her science tells me about Nature’s long, moderate solar-driven 1,500-year cycle.

As for Al Gore, he just needs to tell us when the earth will start warming again—and why we should believe him again.

Citations:

1. Alexander Fraser et al., “East Antarctic landfast sea ice distribution and variability, 2000-2008, Journal of Climate, Sept., 2011. The definition of land-fast ice includes the ice between promontories on the coast, in bays, upwind of glacier tongues that extend into the sea and on the windward side of big grounded icebergs.

2. Heidi Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire:  Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology, Vol., 28, April 2000, pp 379-382

Michelle Bachmann recently promised that, if elected President, she would get gasoline prices back down to $2 per gallon, She reminded us that gas was $1.79 when President Obama took office.

Was this foolish campaign-speak? Probably not. An administration really dedicated to producing more U.S. energy could quickly make lots of progress—and probably encourage similar energy efforts world-wide.

The starting point: Presidential emphasis that the UN’s global warming models have already proved false. Instead of exponential man-made warming, we’ve had a normal step-change in the earth’s long, normal climate cycle: Roman Warming, Dark Ages, Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age, Modern Warming. The U.S. Solar Observatory now predicts a slow global cooling during the next Presidential cycle. That implies only another 0.5 degrees of natural cyclic warming over the net several centuries. Then earth will get another “little ice age” that will make people long for global warming again.

Millions of Americans might not believe such a statement—but just as many now would. Public belief in man-made warming has plummeted during the recent non-warming years. Bachmann could present the climate cycle evidence from the ice cores and fossil pollen—and from the new high-quality cosmic-ray experiment at CERN in Geneva. Her statements could force our major media to present a broader climate picture than they have.

Next easy step: Restart normal government permitting for oil and gas drilling. Exxon has three big new oil finds in the Gulf that could be the biggest Gulf field ever. Exxon can’t get production permits; Ditto for Shell in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. Go back to permitting “normal” drilling permits on federal lands ashore. Should we drill off the U.S. East Coast?

More controversial: Rescuing mountain-top coal mining in West Virginia. The “environmental” case against this is trivial. Underground mining continues to risk miners’ deaths and more unemployment. Unlike Obama’s bankrupt solar panels, this would keep working long-term, even though it is visually ugly.

On to shale gas and oil, the new wunderkinder of world energy: The U.S. has a great deal of both, most of it just beginning to be tapped. The New York Times recently crowed that the latest estimate of U.S. shale gas potential is less than the 410 trillion cubic feet estimated this year by our Energy Information Administration.

Even the new estimate, however, is still vastly higher than we thought it could possibly be until the past couple of years—thanks to horizontal drilling and “fracking.”  The new U.S. Geological Service estimate is that the Marcellus Shale formation alone, which stretches down the mountains from New York to West Virginia, may hold 84 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. It may be 141 trillion. The forecast in 2002 was virtually zero.

We’re also starting to tap the equally-important potential of the shale oil in the Bakken Formation under the Dakotas, Montana, and Alberta.

The environmentalists claim fracking threatens our drinking water. But thousands of feet of soil separate the fracking zones from the surface water tables. Moreover, the fracking liquids are 90 percent water, 9.5 percent sand, and half-a percent of mostly table salt and citric acid.

The phenomenon of shale is happening world-wide, especially in energy-short countries like Poland and China. Bachmann’s example would encourage Britain to keep its coal-fired generators, rather than suffering long, needless EU-imposed rolling blackouts.

Would a Bachmann administration actually see gasoline at $2 per gallon?  I doubt it. Especially since such policies would also stimulate the overall economy, boosting economic growth, stock values, employment, and gasoline demand. But nobody would care about the “failed” promise. She—or any other likely GOP candidate—would have cut real energy costs and shifted the nation from despair to enthusiasm.

“It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.”

That’s the incredible message Dr. Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at the respected Macquarie University in Australia, presented recently to the Sydney Institute. Professor Salby’s paper, with all the graphs, will be released in about six weeks. His book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate will be released later this year. Don’t expect an easy read—but if his research holds up, it could well change the direction of the entire climate debate.

Salby suggests that the earth’s own warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age (1680) has produced the higher CO2 levels in our atmosphere today. Not the other way around. He notes that humans emit about 5.5 gigatons of CO2 each year, but the oceans emit about 90 gigatons, and plants about 60 gigtatons. Salby says that many scientists have assumed the net flows of carbon to and from the natural sinks cancel each other out, but there’s no reliable data to confirm this. If there’s been even a fractional change in natural emissions that would overwhelm the human emissions blamed for our warming.

Salby looked at the longest CO2 record we have, Mauna Loa in Hawaii—and graphed the changes from year to year. Some years, the CO2 concentration rose not at all. Some years it rose by 3 parts per million by volume. He reasoned that if the CO2 increases were due to man-made CO2, we should have seen faster increases with global industrialization.

Instead, Salby found that the world warmed fastest during the warm El Nino years—our hottest time periods. The CO2 increased least during the years after volcanic eruptions, when volcanic dust blotted out much of the sunlight—and cooled the earth.

Salby also found that the big sources of CO2 don’t seem to be the industrialized areas such as Western Europe and North America. The sources appear to be more concentrated over the Amazon and tropical Africa. Perhaps the book will tell us why.

If the planet has been warming since 1680 AD, might that be time enough for the earth to reinforce its own heating with extra CO2 from warming seas and more vegetation growing and decaying in the heat? Certainly the warming oceans would be releasing more CO2 and they hold 70 times as much CO2 as the air. The White Cliffs of Dover are calcified CO2 that was up-thrust from the sea bottom by geologic activity, and there is lots more where that came from.

Tom Quirk, a fellow of three Oxford colleges, has also written on the worldwide mixing of CO2. He used the carbon14 emitted by nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s to check the mixing time between hemispheres—as a test for the global atmospheric mixing time of carbon dioxide. It took several years. Measuring the CO2 at Mauna Loa against CO2 measurements at the South Pole, Quirk concluded, “There does not appear to be any time difference between the hemispheres. . . . The annual increases may be coming from a global or equatorial source.”

Such as the oceans?

My colleague Bennie Peiser, of Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, offers some of his latest man-made global warming news:

The Sunday Times noted on May 22 that the UK government has agreed to cut its greenhouse emissions 50 percent by 2027. As a result, “Tata Steel last week announced it was cutting 1,500 jobs at its Scunthorpe and Teeside plants. The company, which employs 21,000 in Britain, has held high-level talks with government in recent weeks over its energy plans. . . . Ineos founder Jim Ratcliffe warned that he could be forced to shut the firm’s Runcorn chlorine plant, a big energy user . . .  and employer of more than 1,000 people. According to Civitas [the think tank] . . . total energy bills . . . could rise by 141 percent by 2020.”

The Henley Standard said May 23 that houses and business premises as of 2016 must qualify for at least an “E” energy rating. At least 682,000 properties will need to be improved—and “this will radically increase rental costs as landlords withdraw their properties from the rental sector.”

Homeowners will also have to retrofit their houses with required energy-saving features such as double-glazed windows and more insulation, said The Guardian May 19. “The householder pays nothing up front, but the equipment and installation costs will be added in installments to the household’s energy bills for years.” At the moment, says the Guardian, householders will be charged market interest rates, which could mean 8 percent annually. Germany has attracted homeowner cooperation with subsidized loans as low as 2.65 percent—but the British government probably can’t afford to offer that.

The Sunday Telegraph of May 22 says the Welsh Assembly faces “the biggest consumer demonstration so far in Britain” if it goes forward with a plan for 800 giant new wind turbines on mid-Wales hills. In the Welsh Parliament, Glyn Davies said “the two-megawatt turbines would cost at least [$2.7 billion, plus another $500 million] for the infrastructure.” In contrast, a far bigger gas-fired power plant near Plymouth will produce power without subsidy at one fifteenth the cost—and without disfiguring the Welsh hills. “How many of those assembly members,” he asked, “will manage to step outside the bubble of illusion surrounding wind power?”

David Rose in The Mail on Sunday, May 22, reported a remarkable meeting of climate skeptics and “warmists.”  He asked John Mitchell of the British Meteorological Office how long the planet’s non-warming would have to continue before [Mitchell] would start to question the computerized climate models. Mitchell replied, “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful.”  In other words, don’t doubt the coming disaster of man-made global warming just because the planet has stopped warming.

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Institute told the meeting, “a key determinant of climate is the level of cosmic rays from outer space that hit the earth:  these high-energy particles ‘seed’ the clouds. . . . More rays mean more clouds, and in turn a cooler climate.” Svensmark has demonstrated that “quite small variations in the amount of cloud cover have a big effect on temperature, leaving only a “small ‘residual’ role for man-made CO_2.”

Finally, Briton Matt Ridley in the May 21 Wall Street Journal reported, “Haiti meets about 60 percent of its energy needs with charcoal produced from forests. Even bakeries, laundries, sugar refineries and rum distilleries run on the stuff. Full marks to renewable Haiti, the harbinger of a sustainable future! Or maybe not: Haiti has felled 98 percent of its tree cover and counting. . . . Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal.”

Computer models at Stanford University have just “told” us that man-made global warming has already sapped some of the yield potential from our food crops. They say wheat yields would have been 5.5 percent higher since 1980 without the earthly warming; corn yields would have been 3.8 percent higher.

Stanford’s computers apparently didn’t tell their programmers that U.S. corn yields have actually risen by more than 60 percent since 1980—during a period when they were supposedly hampered by too much heat. Wheat yields rose 14 percent, aided by higher levels of CO₂, which act like fertilizer for plants.

In fact, if you’re worried about global food production, don’t pay much attention to this study. Recall that our recent temperatures have recently been about the same as in 1980 and 1981. Net warming since 1940 is only about 0.2 degrees C. Those are not numbers that would frighten a plant breeder, who understands that all of the wild species have proven they can handle climate changes of at least 4 degrees C with little problem.

Computer models only work if they have been programmed with adequate information. The computerized climate models, for example, claim that the earth’s recent warming is “unprecedented.” However, nobody told the computers about the Medieval Warming (950–1200 AD) and the Roman Warming (200 BC– 600 AD), both warmer than today.

Moreover, our corn, wheat, and rice are all originally tropical crops:

• Corn originated in the hot, wet lowlands of Mexico—and didn’t get cold tolerant enough for the Corn Belt until after 4,000 years of careful seed selection by many generations of farmers.
• Wheat was native to the Fertile Crescent—the hot, dry regions of Palestine and Israel. In the Punjab today, it tolerates summer temperatures as high as 100 degrees F.
• Rice evolved in the Yangtze River Valley of China, where summer temperatures also rise above 100 degrees F. But rice thrives, too, in Manchuria at summer temperatures of only 80 degrees.

Drought, not temperature, has been the real enemy of food production, around the world and over time. The big droughts have come more often during the “little ice ages” than during the predominantly good weather of the global warmings. The warmings have been the good times, for humans, crops, and wildlife.

Over the last 4000 years, the region of Iraq has had droughts as long as 300 years during “little ice ages.” Its cities and fields were abandoned, left to nomadic shepherds. Egypt suffered only 8 percent of its Nile floods below normal during the Medieval Warming—but 38 percent below-normal floods during the Little Ice Age. Closer to home, California had two century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming.  Perhaps the computers should be programmed to look for shifting rain patterns and not worry about a 0.2 degree shift in temperature.

The real food challenge? The world will need to nearly double its farm output in the next 40 short years, to meet a last, moderate increase in population—and a huge surge in affluence. The rising incomes will have everybody in the world bidding for a high-quality diet. We’ll need all the technology research can muster, including drought-resistant crops.  Otherwise, food prices will soar and wildlife habitat will disappear under innumerable plows.

In the April 21^st issue of the far-left New Republic, associate editor Bradford Plumer asked his readers whether the Greens’ climate strategy had been a “total flop.” He said the Greens had helped elect Barack Obama and a filibuster-proof majority in both Houses of Congress, and approved Obama’s Cabinet and “czars.” The President was expected to roll over the climate deniers.

“Instead,” says Plumer, “the climate push was . . . a total flop. By late 2010, the main cap-and-trade bill had fizzled out in the Senate; not a single Republican would agree to vote for it. Greens ended up winning zilch from Congress, not even minor legislation to boost renewable electricity or energy efficiency. Worse, after the 2010 midterms, the House GOP became overrun with climate deniers, while voters turned apathetic about global warming.”

Plumer wants to know who or what to blame. Was it strategy? Money? A failure of Presidential will? None of the above. The Greens and Obama are failing on emission controls for the simplest of reasons. The earth stopped warming.

James Hansen told the Senate in 1988 that the earth would thenceforth do nothing but get rapidly warmer, dictated by rising concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere.  For a time, Hansen’s predictions seemed to be accurate—but then after 1998 the warming trend stopped. CO₂ concentrations continued to rise, but the temperatures didn’t. The public began to wonder if the previous warming-with-CO2 had been a coincidence.

Then came 2007, and a sharp drop in global temperatures! The computer models’ predictions had failed. The mainstream media kept mostly silent about this unnerving development, but the blogs and talk radio didn’t. This was itself a key change in the public persuasion machinery, which had previously been unanimous in its promotion of man-made warming.

The lack of public panic on temperatures has been supported by the satellites, arguably the best source of global temperature information ever devised. The alarmists kept shouting “record high averages” but the satellites have revealed only a modest increase since 1979, and no recent upward temperature trend.

The skeptics also note that the thermometer record has recently trended both upward and downward—in 30-year spurts. Those spurts now appear linked to a 60-year cycle in the Pacific. In 2008, NASA said its satellites confirmed the Pacific moving into a cool phase, which is likely to last 25 years.  The sunspot index has just been through an ultra-long minimum, which also suggests colder temperatures. Is this another climate step-change?

Climate legislation now hinges on the temperatures over the next three years or so. A cooling trend will endorse the solar cause of warming. A resumption of warming will re-endorse the greenhouse theory.

But the public isn’t waiting. They’ve already “gone apathetic,” to quote Plumer. Concern about global warming has dropped 12 percent in America since 2001, according to a March Gallup poll. We’ve had a series of obviously colder, snow-filled winters. Several of the IPCC scare stories have been proven wrong. The fear of man-made warming has dropped below critical levels.

Prediction: Global warming is a dead issue unless the planet can be persuaded to start warming again, quickly. Don’t blame the President or the eco-ad campaign. Blame the thermometers.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO₂ emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO_2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources:

1 )The Hindustan Times January 21, 2011.

2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

DENNIS T. AVERY, an environmental economist, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A recent article in the British journal Nature warns that polar bears are increasingly mating with grizzly bears—because man-made climate change is rapidly melting the Arctic sea ice on which the polar bears love to hunt seals.

Breathlessly, we’re told that a hybrid grizzly/polar bear was discovered in 2006. More recently another bear shot by a hunter also had mixed DNA. The offending hybrid bears should be “culled”—a kinder word than “killed”—according to lead author Brendan Kelly of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hold on a minute.  Let’s bless this story with some bits of reality. :

First, there’s no evidence the Arctic ice cap is really shrinking. The Arctic has a warming/cooling cycle of about 70 years, and the old archives of the New York Times are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s about the Arctic ice disappearing. Those 1920’s stories turned out to be wrong, and the ice-expert Russians tell us they’ll be wrong this time too.

The Arctic has warmed more than the rest of the planet since 1850, but the Arctic always warms and cools more rapidly than the earth’s lower latitudes. It has to do with the laws of physics.

Second, the polar bear was originally an offshoot of the brown bear family. The polar bear is thought to date from about 200,000 years ago—when a population of brown bears was apparently trapped by glaciers in an area near Siberia. Those bears underwent a rapid series of evolutionary changes to survive, including changing the color of their fur to better disguise themselves from the seals, and changing the shape of their bodies to facilitate swimming.

Third, there’s precious little evidence of any trend toward more hybrid bears. Two bears in five years across the entire Canadian polar bear habitat can hardly be dignified as a trend. Especially, since it’s just a reverse engineering of the polar bear’s original evolution.

Why did our NOAA author write up this bit of information as a trend that could “doom the polar bear”? Why did one of the two most prestigious science journals in the world print it, based on such flimsy evidence?  Could this be just a continuation of the scientific sell-out on “blame humans for destroying Nature”? The scare has meant billions of dollars for a few key groups and front-page headlines for climate alarmists and credulous “environmental writers” around the world.

If the Siberian humans of 200,000 years ago had killed all the white bears that began to appear, we’d never have had the polar bear species. Humans would have forestalled one of Nature’s major strategies for improving and adapting her animals. Are today’s humans proposing to play the eugenics card to stop adaptation? Are activists afraid of the adaptations the animals produce themselves? Further, we know all of today’s species have adapted to massive past changes in the earth’s climate.

The claim of “unprecedented speed” in modern climate change is false. At the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event 11,500 years ago, temperatures near Greenland rose 15 degrees C in less than a human lifetime! Ocean temperatures and sea ice conditions apparently moved even faster. The polar bears obviously survived this.

(A question: About 500 Polar bears are killed by permit each year in Canada. Will each bear have its DNA tested and will hunters be charged more or less if their kill counts as a hybrid?)

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Sources

1. “Interspecies mating could doom polar bear,” The Independent t(UK), Dec. 19, 2010.

2. “Another  Pizzly: DNA Tests Confirm Polar Bear-grizzly Hybrid,”

www.polarbearsinternational.org/news/another-pizzly-dna-tests-confirm-polar bear-grizzly-hybrid

3. J. W. White et al., “Clocking the Speed of Climate Change: The End of the Younger Dryas as Recorded by Four Greenland Ice Cores,” American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #U41B-07

CHURCHVILLE—VA: The New York Times marvels editorially that none of the Republicans running for the Senate accept the “scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.”  Maybe that’s because the Republicans come from more rural (Red) states that haven’t had any warming—man-made or otherwise.

My colleague Ed Long, formerly a NASA physicist, has found a severe problem with the “official” U.S. temperature records from the Goddard Space Institute and the National Data Collection Center. Both data sets deal with the inevitable gaps in station-by-station data by averaging the gap station with another nearby station. Supposedly, this works because “stations in the same latitude bands tend to share a more similar climate.”

Too often, however, this has led to averaging rural and urban temperatures together. Inevitably, that means the blended temperatures will be higher. Due to the Urban Heat Island effect, a big city can raise its own temperatures by five degrees C. Even a small city can be 2 degrees C warmer than the surrounding countryside. The rural population of America has stayed roughly the same since 1950, but the urban population doubled from 1950–1960—and has continued to grow twice as fast.

Long says GISS “adjustments” over ten years have progressively lowered temperatures for far-back data and raised the temperatures in the recent past. This “adjustment” increased a 0.35 degree C per century uptrend in 2000 to 0.44 degrees C per century in 2009—a 26 percent increase. NCDC, meanwhile, has shifted the “official” rate of temperature change for 1940–2007 from 0.1 degree per century in the raw data to an “adjusted” 0.6 degrees C per century—a  600 percent “adjustment.”

To assess the real size and meaning of the rural-urban divergence, Long selected one rural station and one urban station per state; the rural and urban station trends were then averaged separately.  The results are startling.

The rural data set shows no warming since 1890! The temperatures have trended up and down, but there’s no overall increase. The urban stations show a strong warming, especially after 1965. Are these two “skeleton sets” of raw data more representative of reality than the urban-polluted “adjusted” data sets in the official records?  Long says “Yes”

• The raw data is that measured at the time, so, simply stated, those were the temperatures.
• The two sets had strikingly similar variations, with the rural set having more variability. The cities were warmer, but less susceptible to short-term changes in air temperatures due to their retained heat.
• The medium-term trends are similar up to about 1965, but the cities warmed much faster after that year. That’s probably not global warming, but rather the in-filling of the cities: higher populations, more and taller office buildings, more streets and parking lots, more lost trees.  The airports have poured more concrete, and become “development hot spots.”

Both data sets show that public opinion has been heavily impacted by the continuing 30-year phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Temperatures rose strongly 1915–1940 during a Pacific warming, but World War II was scarier than any theory about man-made warming. When the PDO trended downward from 1940–1975, newsmagazines and “experts” predicted a new Ice Age. When the temperatures and the Pacific rose strongly again from 1976–98, the man-made warming scare was born and flourished. Now that earth has failed to warm for a decade, public fear of global warming has waned dramatically.

We have clearly been polluting the official temperature record with Urban Heat. Has none of the global warming scientists, cap and trade millionaires, and media folks noticed? Or have the billions and billions of dollars spent to “save the world from pending disaster” clouded their vision?

Source: Edward R. Long, “Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw And Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. SPPI, February 27, 2010.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net