Mike's America: Global Baloney Part Three

New Book Debunks Greenhouse Fears and Points to Natural 1,500-Year Warming Cycles
PRNewswire/ -- A new book that is bound to becontroversial in public policy and environmental circles says that theEarth has a moderate, natural warming roughly every 1,500 years caused by asolar- linked cycle. The current Modern Warming may be mostly due to thatnatural cycle and not human activity, say the book's authors, well-known climate physicist Fred Singer and Hudson Institute economist Dennis Avery.
"Unstoppable Global Warming-Every 1500 Years" (Rowman & Littlefield,276 pages, $24.95) assembles physical and historical evidence of the natural climate cycle that ranges from ancient records in Rome, Egypt, andChina; to 12,000 antique paintings in museums; to Vikings' tooth enamel in Greenland cemeteries; and to high-tech analyses of ice cores, seabed sediments, tree rings, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites.
"The Romans wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain in the first century," says Avery, "and then it got too cold during the Dark Ages. Ancient tax records show the Britons grew their own wine grapes in the 11th century, during the Medieval Warming, and then it got too cold during theLittle Ice Age. It isn't yet warm enough for wine grapes in today's Britain. Wine grapes are among the most accurate and sensitive indicatorsof temperature and they are telling us about a cycle.
They also indicate that today's warming is not unprecedented." "We have lots of physical evidence for the 1,500-year cycle," says Singer. "Yet we don't have physical evidence that human-emitted CO2 is adding significantly to the natural cycle. The current warming started in 1850, too early to be blamed on industries and autos."
Singer notes that humanity learned of the 1,500-year cycle only recently, from the first Greenland ice cores brought up in 1983. The cycle was too long and moderate to be observed by earlier peoples without thermometers and written records. The Greenland ice cores showed the 1,500-year cycle going back 250,000 years. It raises temperatures at the latitude of New York and Paris by 1-2 degrees C for centuries at a time,more at the North and South Poles, with a global average of 0.5 degrees C. In 1987, the first Antarctic ice core showed the cycle extending backthrough the last 400,000 years and four Ice Ages-and demonstrated the cycle was indeed global.
There is also evidence of the 1,500-year cycle in seabed sediments from six oceans, in ancient tree rings from around the Northern Hemisphere, in glacier advances and retreats from Greenland to New Zealand, and in cave stalagmites from every continent including South Africa. The North American Pollen Database shows nine complete reorganizations of the continent's trees and plants in the past 14,000 years, or one every 1,650 years. "The deepest seabed sediment cores show the cycle has been going on for at least a million years," says Avery.
Sunspot observations over the past 400 years, along with modern analysis of carbon and beryllium isotopes, link the 1,500-year cycle to variations recently detected by satellites in the sun's irradiance. Antarctic ice studies show global temperatures tracking closely with atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. However, Singer and Avery note the studies also show that temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes by about 800 years. Thus, more warming has produced more atmospheric CO2, rather than more CO2 producing global warming. This make ssense, say the authors, because the oceans hold vastly more CO2 than the air, and warming forces water to release some its gases. Singer and Avery say that the science of the natural cycle runs counter to what many believe and fear will happen as a result of man-made global warming:
* Wild species won't become extinct in our warming because they've been through at least 600 previous warmings, including the Holocene Warming just 5,000 years ago that was much warmer than today.
* The seas won't rise to drown New York before the next cooling, because 90 percent of the world's remaining ice is in the melt-resistant Antarctic. Even a 5 degree C warming would decrease its ice mass by only 1.5 percent, over centuries.
* Warming won't bring famine, because it brings what crops like -- longer growing seasons, more sunlight, and few untimely frosts. More CO2 also stimulates plants' growth, and enhances their water use efficiency.
"We hope our book will help calm the rampant hysteria about globalwarming and the flawed Greenhouse models," emphasizes Avery. "We should be using our resources and technology to find the best ways to adapt to the inevitable but moderate warming to come, not to study one climate model after another, scare people to death, and pass crippling 'environmental' legislation that would deny the world the economic growth it needs to overcome poverty, the greatest problem of all."

For more, read the discussion (PDF) Avery and Singer held at the Hudson Institute November 9, 2006.

Global Baloney "truth squads" sure do have to overlook quite a bit of contrary scientific data in their mad rush to restructure Western economies!