That is ten times faster than the outside estimates of the historic rise of sea levels. Even during the most rapid meltwater pulse following the end of the Ice Age about 14,200 years ago, evidence suggests that the sea level rose about sixty-six feet over a 500-year period. Gore is telling you that sea levels will rise more than 7.5 times faster than they did during the most rapid phase of major sheet ice melting after the last Ice Age.
That is nonsense. The depth of the permafrost and the altitude of the ice fields in both Greenland and Antarctica mean that the temperature of the Earth would have to rise much higher than any forecast effect of higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 could explain. Greenland Summit is approximately 10,500 feet above sea level. The average annual temperature there is -25.6 °F. Global warming alarmists project an increase in global temperatures of 7.2 °F. Permafrost is safe. You won’t need a kayak to navigate the area around Wall Street. The current hysteria over a projection of an ongoing dramatic rise in sea levels from melting glaciers is remote from the facts.
As the austral winter came to an end on October 7, 2014, Antarctic sea ice, far from melting away, had set a new high record of 7.76 million square miles—about 2.750 million square miles greater than had ever been recorded by satellites since they began tracking sea ice in 1979.21 At that point, CO2 was measured at 336 ppm. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by 20 percent globally. According to scholastic Al’s syllogism, that sea ice shouldn’t be there.
But don’t worry. You don’t have to study the philosophy of science or slog through Geophysics 101 to figure out that rising sea levels are not an imminent threat. All you have to do is watch Al Gore. Look at how he spent some of the outsized fortune he pocketed as the chief crony capitalist on the global warming gravy train: He plopped down $8.875 million to buy a villa on the Pacific Ocean in swanky Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California.
That is the metamessage to take to heart.
Notes
1 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report WGII 6.4, 6.5, Table 6.11, SPM.
2 Mörner, Niels-Axel, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.” See https://www.scribd.com/doc/54200036/Sea-Level-is-Not-Rising-by-Professor-Nils-Axel-Morner.
3 Watts, Anthony, “Remember the Threat of Flooded Atolls and Climate Refugees Due to Sea Level Rise? Never Mind,” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/31/remember-the-threat-of-flooded-atolls-and-climate-refugees-due-to-sea-level-rise-never-mind/.
4 http://matzav.com/world-spending-1-billion-per-day-to-tackle-global-warming/.
5 “WikiLeaks Cables Reveal How US Manipulated Climate Accord,” see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-manipulated-climate-accord.
6 Johnson, Brad, “Tuvalu to Obama and the Senate: The Fate of My Country Rests in Your Hands,” http://grist.org/article/2009-12-14-tuvalu-to-obama-and-the-senate-the-fate-of-my-country/.
7 See Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997).
8 Darwin, Charles, Autobiography (1887), 98–99.
9 See Oskin, Becky, “Was Darwin Wrong about Coral Atolls?,” LiveScience, May 13, 2013, http://www.livescience.com/31975-how-coral-atolls-form.html.
10 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.”
11 Carrington, Damian, “More than 1,000 New Coal Plants Planned Worldwide, Figures Show,” The Guardian, November 19, 2012.
12 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising.”
13 See Mörner, Niels-Axel, “The Greatest Lie Ever Told” (available from [email protected]), http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/sea-levels/ollier2007-26.php.
14 Fracczek, Witold, “Mean Sea Level, GPS and the Geoid,” ArcUser Online (July–September 2003). See http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0703/geoid1of3.html.
15 https://recedingseas.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/mean-sea-level-gps-and-the-geoid/.
16 Mörner, “Sea Level Is Not Rising,” 8.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 For a colorful introduction to Gore’s testimony, see http://drtimball.com/2013/is-al-gore-the-latter-day-pardoner-carbon-credits-are-modern-indulgences/.
20 Bacon, Sir Francis, Novum Organum Scientiarum, trans. G. W. Kitchin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855).
21 “Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum,” NASA Science News, October 7, 2014, http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/07oct_antarcticseaice/.
Chapter Twelve
Can Food Crises Trigger Collapse?
The Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Tuesday asked the government to take serious steps to ensure food security in the country as an international food crisis can engulf the world soon . . . Dr. Murtaza Mughal said that the vulnerable and the poor would be hardest hit who spend as much as 60 to 75 per cent of their income on food. He said that situation at home is far from encouraging; flawed policies have left almost all the federal and provincial departments related to agriculture as dysfunctional . . . The matter should not be taken lightly as during the last crisis 30 countries witnessed food riots while many governments were sent packing.
—Pakistan Today, July 25, 2012
In 2013, when I told my Strategic Investment readers that an unexpected turn toward colder weather could precipitate a range of economic challenges, colder weather had already begun to affect the economy. Ironically, as John Williams showed in Shadow Government Statistics, the first impact of extraordinarily cold weather was to artificially inflate the government’s defective economic statistics through a spike in utility usage, and related industrial production, in each month of the first quarter of 2013.1
The proximate effect of a colder climate is deflationary. It increases heat load, thus magnifying power requirements for a modern economy. Colder winters mean greater energy consumption, ramping up utility usage. Colder climate makes you poorer as you have to pay more to heat your homes, body, and car. Colder climate makes life’s necessities more expensive. It reduces purchasing power and contracts real income, contributing to recession.
Coldest Year since 1883
Looking ahead, the question is how adverse could the consequences be if, as some solar physicists suggest, the recent spate of colder weather deepens into another Little Ice Age?
As reported in Der Speigel, March of 2013 was the coldest it had been in Germany since 1883.2 Yet 2013 was the solar maximum for Solar Cycle 24. The cycle is so named because it is the twenty-fourth eleven-year Schwab cycle since scientists began counting these cycles of solar activity from the eighteenth century until the present.
Proxies for Solar Irradiance
There is fairly complete sunspot data going back to 1610. Generally speaking, higher sunspot activity is associated with warmer weather. This has been known since long before the seventeenth century.
Observation and recording of sunspots by Imperial Chinese astronomers began during the Shang Dynasty (1700 BC to 1027 BC). The Chinese kept detailed sunspot records for thousands of years. They observed that more sunspots were correlated with warmer weather. Feng, or abundance, was associated with the Dou, one of seven words for “sunspot.”3
William Herschel, the German-born, British polymath who coined the term “asteroid,” discovered some 2,400 heavenly objects, including the planet Uranus, along with two of its major moons, Oberon and Titania, as well as two moons of Saturn and distant nebulae. In addition to taking an interest in sunspots and the link between solar activity and terrestrial climate, he was also a professional violinist and oboist who composed twenty-four symphonies.
In 1801, just about a year after he discovered infrared radiation, Herschel published his Observations Tending to Investigate the Matters of the Sun, in Order to Find the Causes or Symptoms of Its Variable Emission of Light and Heat.4 He reasoned that fewer sunspots meant less light and heat from the Sun and thus poor harvests. Herschel correlated sunspot records with the price of wheat, observing that the price of wheat soared when there were fewer sunspots.
More recently, two Israeli resea
rchers, Lev A. Putilnik of the Israel Space Agency and Gregory Yom Din of the Golan Research Institute, have confirmed Herschel’s insight by analyzing the direct link between wheat prices and solar activity in the seventeenth century. They concluded that history shows—not surprisingly—rising food costs during solar minima, or times of low solar output.5
Solar physicists distinguish between two types of solar minimum: regular oscillation type and the more dramatic Grand Minimum of the Maunder type, such as that marking the Little Ice Age. During the 1890s, English astronomer William Maunder published two papers associating colder weather during the seventeenth-century nadir of the Little Ice Age with an almost total absence of sunspot activity. For one thirty-year span within the Maunder Minimum, only fifty sunspots were observed, whereas during the recent period of global warming 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots would have been typical.
Interest in Sunspots Wanes
Notwithstanding the strong intellectual pedigree for observations linking sunspots to climate stretching back for thousands of years, the appreciation of this link was far stronger at the end of the nineteenth century than it has been lately. Herschel and Maunder believed there was a strong link between sunspots and climate. Al Gore doesn’t.
The astronomers and solar physicists of the earlier days lived before the triumph of crony capitalism. King George III may have caused the founding fathers’ heartburn, but he didn’t put political pressure on Herschel to deny that climate on Earth is informed by the radiance of the Sun.
By contrast, today’s climate researchers have been bribed by government grants totaling more than $100 billion to argue that human CO2 emissions are fostering rapid global warming. When politicians discovered an imperative for linking CO2 emissions to global warming, appreciation for the Sun’s role in climate drastically receded. With all the pressure to make the Earth, rather than the Sun, the center of the climate mechanism, it is hardly surprising that the UN’s IPCC claimed in its 2007 report that only 7 percent of the change in temperatures over time could be attributed to the Sun.
This orthodoxy began to wobble ever so slightly in May 2012 when the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics published research by Norwegian scientists who found a strong correlation between the length of the solar sunspot cycle and the earth’s temperature during a specific cycle. While the Norwegians did not argue that solar output is the only driver of climate variability, they did suggest that its importance is as much as a magnitude (a factor of ten) greater than the IPCC would have you believe.6
Notwithstanding all the lures, financial incentives, and political pressures for climate researchers to go along with the global warming gag, a surprising number of independent scholars have continued to think for themselves, including a number who have forecast a forthcoming Grand Minimum of solar activity, perhaps comparable to that of the Maunder Minimum that seems to have caused the last Little Ice Age. Two of them are Silvia Duhau, professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires, and Cornelis de Jager, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. Both have published a series of papers in recent years analyzing solar variability.
Of particular interest is “The Forthcoming Grand Minimum of Solar Activity.” In this 2010 paper, they conclude that solar variability is entering into a long Grand Minimum that will last for at least a century. They show that the Solar System has been in a transition phase since the turn of the millennium that should have ended by 2014. We are transitioning from the Grand Maximum of the twentieth century to a Grand Minimum that should bring sharply colder temperatures.7
This raises an important question for your investments, your business, and your family: Do you want to trust your future to the inventor of the Internet, Al Gore? Or should you take a contrarian view? Or at least draw up some contingency plans in the event that thousands of years of experience correlating high solar activity with prosperity and low solar activity with economic depression, dearth, devolution, and collapse—in other words, the Dark Ages—might still carry value as you harness your intuitions about the future? As you ponder that, bear in mind that it isn’t only obscure Argentine and Dutch researchers who are focusing on solar activity.
NASA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Solar Cycle Prediction Panel is a group of solar physicists assembled periodically under the auspices of the US government. They, too, identify the solar maximum for Cycle 24 as having occurred in 2013.
Based on what we have come to consider normal patterns of solar activity, 2013 should have been a warmer year than normal. But low temperature records were broken around the globe. If this was a solar maximum, it implies that the next solar minimum could bring bitterly cold weather—quite the opposite of Al Gore’s much-hyped global warming.
In other words, frigid weather during a solar maximum, when we should be warmer, is a portent of much colder weather to come. As astrophysicist Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction.com points out, solar activity has been generally very low, providing further evidence of an inevitable shift toward a new mini ice age. Corbyn states that the emphasis on CO2’s effect on climate has pointed the world in the wrong direction. According to Piers Corbyn, brother of British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, “man-made climate change does not exist and the arguments for it are not based on science.”8
He suggests that global cooling is now “locked in.” His predictions of a soon-beginning deep freeze match those of other solar physicists, like the late Dr. Theodor Landscheidt of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Dr. Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the University of Mexico, and Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, a prominent Russian solar physicist.
There is general agreement within the scientific community that the current Holocene interglacial warming will be followed sometime before the crack of doom by another full-fledged Ice Age. Of more immediate concern is the prospect of another Little Ice Age. In my view, the indisputable fact that the world is cooling while CO2 emissions continue to rise lends credibility to predictions of another Little Ice Age.
It is not immaterial to the thinking person that the contrarian forecasts of solar physicists deciphering cycles of the Sun have proven more reliable than predictions of global warming due to CO2 emissions. Because of the huge, lavishly funded global warming bureaucracy embedded in governments and UN agencies employed full-time to gin up scarce stories to stampede you into supporting draconian measures to reduce CO2 emissions, the public record is replete with official predictions of unstoppable warming. These have proven spectacularly wrong.
In fact, they have been so wide of the mark that it is embarrassing. I have in my notes about twenty pages of single-spaced links to articles citing research and peer-reviewed studies disproving and debunking climate forecasts extrapolating catastrophic consequences from the increase in man-made CO2 emissions in the atmosphere.
These included suggestions that polar bears were threatened with extinction due to heatstroke. Yet an aerial survey released by the Government of Nunavut showed that the polar bear population was flourishing, having grown by up to 66 percent.9
You may also remember global warming alarms about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and Greenland. Don’t forget how that melting was supposed to flood New York City. This was just one gaudy detail in a parade of horrors involving the rapid rise of sea levels. And along with the hysteria over flooding, you also supposedly faced an epidemic of wildfires. These predictions are little better than bunk.
In 2005, the IPCC projected that “by 2010 the world will need to cope” with a stampede of 50 million climate refugees who purportedly would flee their homes due to the flooding of coastal cities and the rapid expansion of deserts. The UN even posted helpful maps on their websites to alert residents of the supposedly endangered locales that they might wish to flee.
As you know, 2010 has come and gone. Is there any sign of the 50 million (some global warming alarmists said 200 million) climate refugees clamoring for asylum in the uplands of
the world?
No. Not a trace.
If you review the old maps where the UN projected catastrophic flooding and update the population figures for these supposedly vulnerable areas, there is no evidence of even 50 climate refugees, let alone 50 million. As Gavin Atkins pointed out, a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that those places identified as most at risk of having climate refugees are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world. A map on the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) website highlighting the so-called environmental danger zones was taken down.
You can’t blame the climate Nazis for being embarrassed. Their intellectual position is less respectable than that of the Ptolemaic consensus that opposed Galileo’s heresy that the Sun is the center of the Solar System. The global warming propagandists claim that human action in emitting CO2 is more important as a driver of climate than the Sun.
On the face of it, this claim was always unlikely because the Sun is the prime source of warmth in this neighborhood of the galaxy, and human CO2 emissions are a tiny fraction of naturally occurring CO2.
The Breaking Point Page 23