Are scientists coming back to science?

One of the lighter moments in our movie, An Inconsistent Truth, is when we’re making the point that of all the factors global warming alarmists point to they ignore that big, burning ball of fire in the sky.  We conclude the segment with a paraphrase of political guru James Carville.  It’s the sun, stupid.

Sometimes there’s a point when scientists are so immersed in the science that they can’t see the obvious.  The proverbial not being able to see the forest for the trees.  I believe the great global warming debate will go down in history as one such example.

The French news agency, AFP, recently ran a story on how the sun has been surprisingly

quiet lately.  Scientists like to package things as chaotic as the sun into nice, little packages that can be studied and presented in nice, little, peer-reviewed papers.  The only problem is the sun is unpredictable.  Usually we can expect around 120 sunspots per day in a “normal” 11-year cycle, they tell us.  The most recent cycle was forecast to peak at around 90 sunspots per day.  It’s coming in at about half that, or roughly a quarter of the 250-year average.

Interestingly enough, scientists tell us the last time this happened was around 1650 to 1715.  They refer to that as the Maunder Minimum, named after a 19th century husband and wife scientific team who discovered the anomaly.  Many scientists now believe the Maunder Minimum sparked what is now referred to as the Little Ice Age, a period of prolonged cooling that ran from about 1650 to 1850.

And guess what happens after you come out of a little ice age.  You start to warm a bit, as we have since 1850.  Now that the sun is quiet it would make sense that we’d begin another cooling phase, as many scientists now predict.  Instead of common sense another theory captured the imagination of scientists and that is a theory that manmade CO2 is now driving climate change.  The only problem with that theory is there doesn’t seem to be any correlation.

No one is denying that carbon dioxide levels have risen substantially over the last 100 years.  The problem with the theory is the temperatures haven’t followed the rise in CO2.  In fact, as we point out in the movie, if you go back and closely examine the historic record you’ll find that temperature rise precedes the rise in carbon dioxide.  In other words, as the planet heats the ocean temperatures rise and give off more CO2.

It’s interesting that this week much of the nation has been going through a cold snap.  We must be careful that we don’t confuse weather change with climate change.  The global warming alarmists are famous for this.  Any time there’s an unusual heat wave they trot out their theory of global warming.  On weeks like this they’re conspicuously quiet except for those who call this “extreme weather” and blame it on humans.

The odd thing is there is no scientific scenario in which CO2 would cause dramatic cooling.  This whole theory of CO2 causing weather extremes is nonsense.  Either additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing the planet to heat up or it’s not.  The greenhouse effect is just that.  Greenhouses get warmer, not colder or wetter or dryer or stormier.  These folks are so determined to blame humans that they ignore common sense and even science itself.

There is basically one dominant factor that determines whether we’re going to be warm or whether we’re going to be cool. 

It’s the sun, stupid! 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Doubling down on the global warming hysteria

Is there any wonder that young folks are losing sleep.  Washed up rocker Bob Geldof continues to struggle for relevance with outlandish statements.  "We may not get to 2030," Geldof warned kids at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg, unless something is done about global warming.

Geldof told the young delegates, "There will be a mass extinction event.  That could happen on your watch.  The signs are that it will happen soon."  This is the same hysterical nonsense that has been recklessly thrown out by global warming alarmists for decades.  The bad news for them is "soon" has

come and gone a thousand times and none of what they've predicted has come true.

Let's review.  Al Gore told us in his dreadfully pessimistic motion picture that hurricanes would continue to grow in severity and numbers.  Neither has been true.  In fact, we've been experiencing an abnormally quiet period for hurricanes since Katrina in 2005.  Gore also warned that the polar bears were nearing extinction.  The truth is polar bear populations have exploded since the 1980s.  Gore and his Branch Algorian disciples told us there would be no sea ice in the Arctic by the year 2013.  Arctic sea ice has not only not disappeared, it's 60 percent larger than it was last year.  The doomsday prophets have predicted all sorts of mayhem if we didn't change our evil ways and none of it has come true.

But the torpedo under the water line to the global warming scare has been their very own climate models.  Way back when they were predicting dramatic temperature rise because of our relentless release of CO2 into the atmosphere.  The day of reckoning has arrived.  There are 73 climate models dating back to 1979, the year NASA launched a satellite to track temperature around the globe.  Even though CO2 has continued to rise, temperatures have not.  In fact, despite the IPCC choosing to ignore the obvious, global temperatures have remained steady for the last ten to fifteen years.  In other words, ALL of the climate models were wrong.

The IPCC tells us we can't draw any conclusions from just 15 years of data then, in the same report, tells us humans have been causing global warming only since 1950.  So, 63 years of data plucked from several million years is definitive but 25 percent of that time period is apparently irrelevant if it doesn't fit their political agenda.

You see, Geldof, Gore, et al use guilt as a powerful motivator to separate people from their money.  If you've been convinced you're destroying the planet you'll pay any price to repair the damage.  These hucksters of hysteria know that.

Perhaps Geldof should've picked a time a little further down the road.  The year 2030 is just 17 years away and Bob Geldof is now 62.  Like Al Gore and the IPCC, he may just live long enough to see how ridiculously wrong he was.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

A model of climate hysteria

‘What to Make of a Warming Plateau.’  That was the headline recently in the New York Times.  Though the Times writer clung to the debunked theory that we as humans are causing the world to heat up the evidence is now swamping the global warming alarmists.

The Times calls what’s happening a “plateau” or a “slowdown.”  NPR said a few years ago that global warming was on vacation.  (And they weren’t even trying to be funny)  All this despite record amounts of what the alarmists keep telling us is ruining the planet: carbon dioxide.

It’s time to face the music.  The theory from Al Gore and the rest of the hysterics was that we were spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and the result was the planet was going to heat up.  We are spewing CO2.  It’s not a poison, by the way.  It’s what plants need in order to thrive.  Despite our spewing, temperatures are not rising.  In fact, all of the climate models have been wrong.

Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville have been tracking global temperatures for years.  They recently published a graph that plots 73 climate models and compares those models to the actual temperature trends taken from satellites since we’ve been tracking the earth’s temperature which started in 1979.  Every climate model was way off.  They all predicted a huge increase when temperatures, since we first started measuring with satellites, have been flat.

Why have the climate models been wrong?  Because they all assumed a cause-and-effect of carbon dioxide and temperature rise.  As CO2 levels have risen global temperatures have flattened out.  You don’t have to be a scientist to figure this one out.  Manmade CO2 has little or nothing to do with temperature.  There are so many other variables that have a much greater effect on global temperatures.

One of the major theories supported by Dr. Spencer is water vapor or global cloudiness.  Dr. Spencer refers to this as the sun shade.  Some scientists are studying how global cloudiness affects the global temperatures and they still don’t have a handle on it but they do believe this is where we should be concentrating our efforts rather than on CO2.

Another theory is an obvious one that, for some reason, is completely ignored by those determined to blame man for the destruction of the planet and that’s the sun.  The sun, naturally, is a huge determining factor in temperature.  How it behaves, even the slightest change, can have major repercussions on our planet.  The problem is if it’s the sun then there’s no one to blame and, in turn, no one from whom they can redistribute the wealth.

For, you see, that’s what this whole global warming argument has been about.  If Gore and the rest of the warmists can convince you that you’re to blame for destroying the planet then they can get you to go along with a carbon tax to atone for your sins.  The producers of energy will pay those who aren’t producing.  The money-changers who facilitate the transaction pocket the commission and become billionaires in the process.

It’s a brilliant plan.  There’s only one problem.  It’s all a lie and now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.  They were hoping they could frighten us with their climate models and force us into cap-and-trade laws but we were able to stall them for far too long.  Long enough for their climate models to be proven a complete hoax.

One sure-fire way to tell is someone is lying is to look at their track record.