If Only Man Wasn't in the Way

Must-read climate change analysis from an unlikely source [links and emphasis added]:

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. [And for significant periods of time.] One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

Hmm… that would take us to… 2248, when I’ll be… 285 years old… guess mittens might be a good investment… or maybe Costa Rican real estate…

The Little Ice Age has been a problem for global warmers because it serves as a reminder of how the earth warms and cools naturally over time. It had to be ignored in the calculations that produced the infamous and since-discredited hockey stick graph that showed a sharp rise in warming alleged to be caused by man.

The answer to this dilemma has supposedly been found by two Stanford researchers, Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird, who announced their “findings” at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. According to them, man not only is causing contemporary warming. He also caused the cooling that preceded it.

This sounds suspiciously like research driven by a positivist agenda, e.g., bolster the thesis that man controls climate. More traditional scientific hypotheses tend to rule out various causes, leaving one with something on which to base a more solid conclusion.

According to Bird and Nevle, before Columbus ruined paradise, native Americans had deforested a significant portion of the continent and converted the land to agricultural purposes. Less CO2 was then absorbed from the atmosphere, and the earth was toasty.

Then a bunch of nasty old white guys arrived and depopulated the native populations through war and the diseases they brought with them. This led to the large-scale abandonment of agricultural lands. The subsequent reforestation of the continent caused temperatures to drop enough to bring on the Little Ice Age.

Implicit in this research is that the world would be fine if man wasn’t in the way. We either make the world too cold or too hot…

Begging the question: Too hot or too cold… by what standard? According to whom? Answer: the next U.S. president and his closest advisors.

In a speech at Harvard last November, Harvard physicist John Holden, President-elect Obama’s choice to be his science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, presented a “top 10″ list of warming solutions.

Topping the list was “limiting population,” as if man was a plague upon the earth... [Now there's a truly chilling notion. Fits in nicely with the culture of death though, i.e., it's consistent.]

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada’s Carleton University, says: “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”

Indeed, a look at a graph of solar irradiance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows little solar activity during the Little Ice Age and significant activity during recent times.

Bottom line: that bright thing up in the sky… might be a good place to start any future analyses.

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