The station’s annual snowfall averaged 624 centimeters per year, with a non-significant trend of +0.5 cm per decade. He found similar positive-but-insignificant trends for spring snowfall, annual stream flow, and precipitation. Nor did he find any trend in the published regional temperatures.

Where’s the evidence of man-made global warming?

James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published way back in 1992 that California’s big-population counties had a strong warming trend, medium-sized counties had a much slower increase, and rural stations almost no temperature rise at all. Meanwhile, the number of reporting stations has fallen from 6000 in 1970 to 2000 today, with mostly the rural stations dropped.

Concrete, car exhausts, and air conditioners have all increased over the last 40 years. Thermometers are increasingly at sewage treatment plants that generate their own heat. The problem isn’t so much Los Angeles, which as been a big city for more than 100 years, but the smaller urban regions that have expanded rapidly. How big is the Urban Heat Bias now? Prominent warming skeptic Fred Singer asks whether the earth is warming only at airports.

NASA recently made a critical adjustment in mean temperature record, after famed whistle-blower Steve McIntyre discovered an error. The adjustment lowered temperatures since 2000 by 0.15 degree C per year. NASA told the media that the change was “not significant.”  But by that standard, the U.S. warming over the past 77 years hasn’t been “significant” either.

The earth is simply not getting the radical warming forecast 20 years ago by modelers such as NASA’s James Hansen. The earth has had no warming since 1998, and temperatures began actually falling in 2007. The longest sunspot minimum in a century is now forecasting colder weather, and the Pacific—our largest heat sink—has shifted into a 30-year cold phase.

.

Recently, global temperature-taking has been obfuscated by a strong El Nino that warmed the past 12 months. Now we’re apparently entering a La Nina, which will drop Pacific temperatures below their long-term mean until next year. It may be several years before we can be sure whether a longer-term Pacific cooling phase has resumed.

In the meantime, President Obama is demanding that we immediately take out “climate insurance,” by blocking new power plants and paying fabulous costs for poor-mileage corn ethanol. Harvard says it may take $7-per-gallon gas to meet the president’s goal of cutting transport greenhouse emissions by 14 percent. Britain’s new government has just blocked the new third runway at Heathrow Airport, to stop “binge flying.”

We’ve known for centuries about the Roman Warming, the cold Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Are we now getting man-made warming—or just recovering from the Little Ice Age? John Christy says our climate is still dominated by natural factors. He says clouds are the key factor. He says the evidence shows the planet responding to heat impulses by producing more clouds, which allow more solar heat to warm it up. And vice versa.

Have our “mainstream” scientists blundered toward the government grant money?

Sources

J. Christy and J. Hnilo; “Changes in the Snowfall of the Southern Sierra Nevada of California since 1916.” Energy and Environment, Vol. 21; 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

Years with few sunspots and relatively high ocean temperatures are less stable, and thus trigger more hurricanes, reports James Elsner, a geography professor at Florida State. He says “With fewer sunspots, there’s less energy at the top of the atmosphere.” Thus the temperature above the hurricane are cooler, he told Florida Today. The differential creates more instability and stronger storms. Our atmosphere responds dramatically to changes in the sun’s UV light, because the ozone layer readily absorbs the UV heat.

Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that began in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted severe cold in the early 1800s.

We’ve also known since 1984 that sunspots correlate strongly with abrupt-but-moderate Dansgaard-Oescher cycles in the earth’s temperature regime—a 2-4 degree C shift about every 700 years. These changes have produced the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and a whole series of moderate climate cycles going back at least 1 million years. The sunspot index has a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s temperatures since 1860, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. The sunspot index has been predicting global cooling since 2000.

Changes in sunspots have also predicted the failure of many human societies over the past 5000 years—including the collapse of the Mayan civilization and the death of the Roman Empire. The Mayans suffered “a century of drought” after 800 AD. The Roman Empire collapsed about 540AD after the end of the Roman Warming, which had given good crop-growing weather to both Europe and North Africa for more than 700 years.  The shift into the Dark Ages turned the cropping seasons cloudy, cool and unstable, with violent storms and untimely frosts. That meant no more free bread for Roman citizens, no grain to feed its legions, and no food to bribe barbarian tribes.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to predict strong warming for the earth over coming centuries, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. However, CO₂ makes up only about .03 percent of the atmosphere, and humans contribute only about 3 percent of the .03 percent.

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama Huntsville, collates the temperature data from the satellites. He says it’s likely that the IPCC has got it backwards. Instead of higher CO₂-induced temperatures creating fewer clouds; fewer clouds may let more solar heat come to earth, and vice versa. That would account for the predictive failures of the global climate models. The models did not foresee the recent cooling of the oceans since 2003, for example.

The sunspots, in fact, now predict a 30-year cooling, to be delivered by the Pacific Ocean’s shift into its cool phase. That, too, will undoubtedly be a product of the sun’s internal chemistry and further evidence of the sun’s massive importance to Planet Earth.

Resources:

J.H. Elsner et al., 2010, “Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation,” Geophysical Research letters, Vol. 37.

Roy Spencer, Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, July 22, 2008.

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

Dan Miller, climate expert with the Roda Group and ardent believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming, responded to Easterbrook at Fox News: “It’s absurd to talk about global cooling when global heating is with us and accelerating.” But Miller is referring to the current temperature spike from an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean—a short-term climate event already ending, according to Pacific sea surface temperatures. The key question now is where the temperatures will go after the El Nino fades.

Easterbrook offered geological evidence that the earth has had ten big “recent” warmings that dwarf the 0.7 degree temperature increase estimated for the 20^th century. Over the past 15,000 years, those temperature shifts drove the earth’s temperatures radically up or down by 9–15 degrees C within a single century. He also noted 60 sharp-but-smaller temperature changes in the past 5,000 years. All of these occurred before 1945, when the post-war Industrial Boom began to ramp up human-emitted CO₂ levels.

Easterbrook calls this evidence “astonishing.” Current data seem to support Easterbrook’s prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO₂ has continued to increase—but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years.

Satellite-measured solar activity has also been trending down moderately, which essentially predicts cooling. And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cool phase, as NASA told us in 2008. Tree rings and coral samples tell us these PDO shifts have predicted moderate cooling for the whole earth, lasting for about 30 years at a stretch. Easterbrook predicts that this PDO phase will last until 2030, with warming from 2030–2060, and then cooling again to 2090.

The PDO, however, doesn’t seem to control whether the planet as a whole will warm or cool over the next century. Easterbrook’s geology says powerful, natural cycles, probably solar-driven, control longer-term climate trends. Ice cores, seashells, and fossil pollen all show a moderate-but-abrupt 1,500-year cycle, which apparently gave us the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming, and 500 similar previous warmings over the past million years.

The prediction: Higher temperatures will not parboil the earth. Global warming will continue, slowly and erratically, perhaps with another 0.5 degree C over several hundred years. The biggest danger will be extended drought in unusual regions, almost certainly including Kenya and California. Such drought ended the Mayan civilization in the 9^th century. But it’s as unstoppable as the sun itself. This very real threat should be the focus of modern technology in helping effected areas to adapt.

Eventually, we’ll get another big Ice Age, and our descendents will deride the memory of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”—as they shiver watching glaciers approach Chicago.

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

A new study shows that flying squirrels have been adapting to recent warming since the 1990s by both moving and hybridizing. C.J. Garroway and his research team trapped more than 1600 of the flying squirrels in Ontario and Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2004. The flying squirrels’ DNA shows the southern G. volans flying squirrels are increasingly mating with the northern G. sabrinus flying squirrels. The researchers say this is the “first report of hybrid zone formation following a range expansion induced by contemporary climate change.”

That’s certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. Ice cores and fossil pollen show the earth has had six major global warmings since the last Ice Age, interspersed with centuries-long cold periods. The earth’s temperatures are always cycling up and down.

We have even more dramatic evidence of creatures moving to stay at the right temperatures from the city of York, England. Excavations under the city find that the nettle ground bug was common in York during the Roman occupation in the first century, and during the Medieval Warming. In between those warm times, it has typically been found in the much-warmer south of England.

On the other hand, Italian researchers have just finished surveying bird species in a high Piedmont valley where the temperature since the early 1990s has increased about 1 degree C. How did the birds adapt?  They did nothing. Sixty-eight bird species were detected in both the 1992-94 survey and the 2003-05 survey. The researchers report “the number of species whose mean elevation increased (42) was higher than the number whose mean elevation decreased (19).”  But the birds move up and average of just  29 meters—not statistically different from zero.

Why didn’t the birds move?  We’d advise asking whether the birds’ food sources moved. Higher levels of CO₂ allow vegetation to adapt to higher temperatures—without moving. Perhaps the foliage, fruits and insects on which the birds depend didn’t change much either.

We might even think about humans adapting to a one-degree change in global average temperatures, rather than destroying our only available energy sources. The net warming since 1850 has been something less than 0.7 degree C when we allow for the increasing impact of urban heat islands on our thermometer 1–3 degree total warming in the early decades. Then the warming rocks along in 30-year up-and-and-down spurts, as we’ve seen in the earth’s 1915–1940 warming, its 1940–1975 cooling, and its 1976-1998 warming. For centuries at a time.  Until the sun brings the next global cooling.

We need to get rid of the biologists’ “climate envelope” theory that predicts species extinctions will occur unless their climate environment remains absolutely stable (never has been, never will be). Looking at real global history, specie extinctions are more likely to happen when the next asteroid collides with earth. Those are the times the earth has lost the vast majority of its species.

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

Our Nobel-winning Energy Secretary is bravely soldiering forth to spend umpteen-trillion dollars of the public’s money to forestall a global warming he doesn’t understand? That’s impressive honesty, especially as the vote on Obama’s proposed hefty energy taxes is coming before the Senate and he will have to support it. Real courage would be to tell the Senate that the computer models have failed “Prediction 101.”

At Oak Ridge, Dr. Chu was referring to the thermometer record, which tells us global temperatures rose sharply from 1860-1880, and then declined again until about 1915. The temperatures zoomed upward again from 1915 to 1940, only to decline moderately from 1940–1975. Recently, after another sharp temperature gain from 1976–1998, the earth has apparently has entered another of the moderate declines Dr. Chu can’t explain.

The relatively warm temperatures over recent months involve another weak El Niño. Later this year, both the sunspots and Pacific temperature pattern indicate falling temperatures for the next 25–30 years.

The computer models have failed to predict or to explain. For some odd reason, however, the UN didn’t ask its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to find the reason for the Modern Warming. They asked the IPCC to find a “human link” to the warming. Given such precise marching orders, the climate modelers pretended global warming was a new phenomenon. They didn’t tell their models about the planet’s hundreds—or thousands—of earlier warmings and coolings that have been occurring more or less in a 1,500-year cycle for at least a million years.  

Now Secretary Chu is caught very publicly between a global warming explanation that is weak on evidence, but supported by his President—human-emitted CO₂—and a competing explanation with lots of evidence, which can’t be admitted.

I guess he hoped that his March 23^rd candor with the Oak Ridge scientists would be ignored by the media. In the past, of course, it would have been. But not today. Not in the wake of the leaked Climategate e-mails. Not when the New York Times has had to sell its building and radically cut staff because so few people read it any more. Most especially not when the earth’s temperatures have been declining.

Let’s be honest. Just as Al Gore benefited hugely during the run-up of temperatures from 1976–98, the skeptics are gaining from the current lack of warming. I wrote some months ago that no sane president would impose heavy energy taxes during a recession while temperatures were declining. President Obama may prove me wrong about his wisdom, but I freely predict his energy taxes will be defeated.   

The sunspots have been predicting the recent cooling since 2000—with the usual ten-year lag. It arrived a bit early, in 2007. Lending weight to the sunspots, NASA told us in early 2008 that its satellites had identified a cooling shift in the Pacific that has historically lasted 25–30 years. And that periodic Pacific cooling has historically brought the temperature of the whole planet down with it.

The climate models have failed, there is no evidence of run-amuck warming and the public is beginning to catch on. Al Gore had better have some important mojo in that little shrine on his million-dollar houseboat—or else he’s going to lose his mandate and his global warming investment empire.  

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

 

Hunger is one of the scare-words always attached to global warming. But a warming world isn’t likely to starve, even with the larger human population expected in 2100.

Start with our knowledge that the Medieval Warming was warmer than today. Ice core data show the Greenland ice sheet then was 2.5 degrees C warmer then, which means most of the world’s current grain belts had significantly longer growing seasons and fewer untimely frosts. Also, lots of sunshine, in contract to the cloudy “little ice ages.”

Most of Europe’s famous castles and cathedrals were built during the Medieval Warming. So were the 10,000 temples at Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Meaning that the Medieval Warming’s longer growing seasons produced enough extra food to pay hundreds of thousands of non-farm workers top wages to construct “luxury” buildings.

Second, we know that added CO₂ in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth. Hundreds of agricultural test plots have demonstrated this, world-wide. CO2 acts like fertilizer, and also increases plants’ water use efficiency. Thus, doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the air raises the productivity of herbaceous plants by 30-50 percent. Fortunately, we’re going to have lots of CO₂ in the air.

A new Chinese report says that Chinese rice production is likely to rise 3–19 percent by 2100, because of CO₂’s fertilization effect—and because farmers will increase their northern crop production. The report says rice production would push further north, with lucrative double-cropping over the whole Yangtze Basin, not just the southern part. Other studies confirm that Chinese farmers would move corn and potato crops farther north into Manchuria with all the crop yields benefitting from higher CO₂ levels.

Most of the world’s recent 0.7 C temperature increase occurred before 1940. Thus, it must be ‘blamed” on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year climate cycle that also produced the Medieval Warming. That natural warming pattern indicates that  tropical temperatures may not even rise much during the coming centuries.

The cycle implies a further temperature rise of 0.5 degree C over the next 300 years, rather than the 5–8 degrees C by 2100 claimed in the computerized models. Remember that we’ve never seen real-world evidence of the runaway warming. The Arctic ice is on a 70-year cycle, and the Antarctic has record amounts of ice and sea-ice. Even the man-made warming believers admit there’s been no warming for 15 years.

We shouldn’t even have to give up meat. Most of the fodder for our livestock comes from the natural grasslands, and from massive consumption of peanut hulls, citrus pulp, feather meal and other “wastes.”  A pound of meat costs 1.4 pounds of human-edible protein—and delivers 1.4 pounds worth of human-edible protein.

The climate models deliberately claim famine and flooding—because you would not otherwise give up 87 percent of your current energy and go voluntarily back to the Stone Age. But the lack of any massive warming over recent decades; and, most of all, the declining heat in the world’s oceans has proven the climate models wrong.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged a billion dollars to help create a “second green revolution” for Africa and other marginal farming regions. Expect to eat well during our Modern Warming— unless governments are foolish enough to tax-away the energy sources needed for truly sustainable production.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

The ice cores tell us the invention of farming came about not long after the end of the last Ice Age, one of the earth’s key climate changes. Modern Homo sapiens had been around for over 100,000 years—but we’ve found no evidence of farming until after the last big ice sheets melted about 10,700 years ago

Before then, humans had been stealing birds’ eggs, digging clams, gathering seeds and picking berries. Stone Age man also learned that his hunting bands could drive big carnivores away from their kills with stone-tipped spears, then feasting on meat they couldn’t catch themselves.

Wondrously, the ice disappeared. The earth’s climate warmed more than 10 degrees C. Chicago, for example, shifted from mile-thick glacier to sunny Corn Belt. That’s certainly climate change in my book. And since the big ice sheets have been gone, the earth’s climate has indeed been relatively stable.

Mostly, the temperatures over the last ten millennia have ranged up and down about 2–4 degrees C at the latitude of Paris or Washington. The major variations have been the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles documented in the ice layers and seabed sediments. Our Modern Warming is apparently the sixth such warming cycle in 10,000 years. The warmest of the recent warming cycles began 9,000 years ago, and was 2.5 degrees warmer than today.

Humans probably continued their traditional hunting and gathering in the first years after the ice receded. But in the Middle East of 9,000 years ago, the Stone Age hunters apparently began to notice recurring seasonal crops of wild cereals. At first, they probably gathered some of the grain to eat, and perhaps some more to lure sheep near enough for killing.

But as human numbers expanded under the basking sun, there may not always have been enough wild game in the Judean hills to feed everybody. The idea of deliberately planting more of the cereal seeds, domesticating livestock and shifting their diets more heavily to grain would gradually have become attractive. And, humans of 10,000 years ago were fully as intelligent, curious, and anxious to survive as we are today.

Once the idea of controlling food production ignited, the rest is history. Farmers have taken over every part of the world that can readily grow crops, and even some difficult eco-systems that are right on the margin, such as Asia’s terraced mountainside rice paddies.  

Many alarmists have warned that today’s “unprecedented warming” would bring poorer crop yields. However, a Chinese research team reported recently in Climate Research that China’s food production has increased during the Modern Warming. Credit for the food production gains goes both to the longer, warmer growing seasons—and to the fertilization effect of higher CO₂ levels have on crop plants. Higher CO₂ levels both stimulate crop growth and increase the plants’ water use efficiency.

Chinese rice and wheat production have expanded north with the 1.1 degree warming of the past 50 years, displacing lower-yield short-season crops. In addition, the extended growing seasons have permitted higher cropping intensities: three crops in two years for many areas where before there was only annual cropping.

Logic should have told us to expect this increased food production—but logic has been in short supply among the global warming alarmists.

 

Resources:

Shahal Abbo, et al., 2010, “Yield Stability: An Agronomic Perspective on the Origin of Near East Agriculture,” Vegetation History and Archeobotany 19: 143-150.

W. Dansgaard et al., 1989, “The abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas climate event,” Nature 339, 532-534.

Dong, et al., 2009, Effect of Post-1980 Warming on Cropping Systems in China,” Climate Research 40: 37-48.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

 

 

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own “heat islands” with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

 

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, “The NCDC’s massaging—they call it ‘adjusting’—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations—unless deception is the goal.”  

 

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized “climate models.” They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

 

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is “supported” by government-manipulated temperature records:

 

• The Russians say Britain’s East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia’s vast hinterlands—because the readings didn’t show global warming.

 

• New Zealand’s official record shows a major warming in the 20^th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

 

• Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman’s KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

 

• James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist,  published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California’s urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

 

We’ve been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a “human fingerprint on our warming” with no credible scientific to support it—and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, “What do I care about a 14-year-old report?” 

 

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer—made with natural gas—is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a “carbon footprint” so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO₂ in the 20^th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

 

The government-sponsored climate research community—for whatever reasons—has apparently betrayed us.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

 

• India has documented that the Intergovernmental Panel’s claim of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was mere speculation—and has now been proven false.

 

• The 2007 IPCC report claimed global warming could cut rain fed African food yields in half by 2020. New lead author Chris Field says this is highly unlikely, and he can find nothing in the report’s supporting chapters to document it.

 

• The Dutch are complaining that the IPCC said half of its land area lies below sea level, when the figure is actually 20 percent.

 

All this criticism is valid and long overdue. But the biggest scandal in the IPCC’s closet remains its 1995 claim to finding a “discernible human influence” on the earth’s changing climate. Lead author Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore government laboratory inserted those words—after the IPCC’s consulting scientists had signed off on a draft that specifically said no such “human fingerprint” had been found! 

 

Santer deliberately reversed the meaning of the whole IPCC 1995 report—and the trajectory of every IPCC document since. He claimed the rewrite was justified by two of his own studies. However, Santer’s papers “cherry-picked” the earth’s temperature record from 1963–1987, ignoring the earlier and later temperatures that didn’t confirm the Greenhouse theory! Thus the IPCC’s whole claim of a “discernible human influence” remains without scientific support to this day.

 

What will we learn next about the IPCC and its frolicking alarmists? Expect proof that the land-based thermometer records have been deliberately sabotaged to lower the temperature readings of yesteryear and raise recent thermometer readings—to make global warming seem scarier.

 

The most obvious case of this record manipulation to date is in New Zealand, where the “official” graph shows the country’s temperatures rose 0.92 degrees C through the 20^th century. However, NIWA’s own raw data showed no 20^th-century temperature uptrend in any of its stations. Is it an accident that most of the world’s raw climate historical data has disappeared? 

 

Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo appeared on John Coleman’s TV special at KUSI-TV on January 14, charging that U.S. official temperatures have been rigged by quietly dropping “cold” weather stations: those at high altitude, high latitude, or in rural areas.

 

Clear back in 1992, James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published a peer-reviewed paper that sorted the state’s weather trends by county population. The urban counties had a strong upward trend of plus 3.14 degrees F per century. Rural stations showed no upward trend at all.

 

Looking back, an “official” global warming of 0.6 degrees since 1900 may not seem all that dramatic. Especially after a dozen years of non-warming. But think how hard it would have been for the global warming alarmists to panic the people if they’d admitted the rural areas hadn’t warmed at all!  That “global warming” was mostly cities ratcheting up their own heat!

 

The supposedly dedicated “climate researchers” have nearly cost the world trillions of dollars in higher energy costs, agonies of wintertime suffering for the elderly “energy poor,” and needless deaths for lack of air conditioning in the summers. They and the Green campaigners came awfully close to destroying human society as most of us have known it.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

 

 

Carried to its extreme, the global warming scare would pressure India to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half its population—and even slaughter its 200 million sacred cows, which daily produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Either would cause widespread rioting.

 

The warming alarmists have predicted awful things for India unless fossil fuels are curbed, including submergence of its coastal lands, lack of water for irrigation, increased cyclone activity, and forced shifts in rice production that would threaten hunger for millions.

 

I predict the new Indian research unit will find that the IPCC’s data and conclusions have been deliberately and massively misleading and the scares wildly overstated, while actual temperature changes have been small and non-threatening. We recently finished the third sharp increase in global temperature since 1850, including one from 1860–1880, and another from 1910–1914. All ended in coolings, not runaway warmings.

 

Other emerging countries have been willing to let the Western societies sacrifice themselves to the IPCC’s man-made warming dogma—and even hoped for some of those big “carbon guilt payments” the West has talked about. But it’s clear now that the West won’t be making big carbon payments to the Third World.

 

The breaking point for India came when the IPCC’s 2007 report announced that India’s Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than the world’s other glaciers, and might be completely gone by 2035—or sooner. Worse, the report claimed that the billions of people who depend on Himalayan snowmelt would no longer get adequate drinking and irrigation water from the Indus and Ganges Rivers. That could have triggered a major refugee problem for neighboring countries, or beyond.

 

India didn’t believe it, and assigned their top glaciologist, V.K. Raina, to assemble a new assessment from satellite data and laborious on-site measurements. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced a few weeks ago that Raina and his teams had found the IPCC was wrong. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” which Ramesh pointed out are at much higher altitudes than most of the world’s other glaciers. He added that though some glaciers are receding, they were doing so at a rate “not historically alarming.” He further noted that India’s rivers actually depend primarily on the monsoons. .

 

In a remarkable finding, the Raina report claims the Ganotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded faster before 1978, and is today “practically at a standstill.” Newspapers warned that the Siachin glacier in Kashmir had shrunk as much as 50 percent—but Raina reports that those claims are simply wrong, that the big glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” 

 

The IPCC Chairman, India-born Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed the Indian response as “voodoo science,” But the flimsy basis for the IPCC claim has now been revealed, and the IPCC has had to issue an apology. Since then, additional IPCC claims have been found to lack scientific support.

 

My prediction:  The Indian science panel will hasten the end for the IPCC’s once-dominant view of man-made climate change.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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