Climategate: What We Should Be Doing About Natural Climate Change
Still, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other government agencies persist in over-stepping their regulatory authority to jam climate related regulations into our lives and economy at the expense of liberty, jobs, and incomes. Federal control of energy production and use, advocated by special “climate” interests, will have a vanishingly small effect on slowing three and a half centuries of very slow, erratic, but natural global warming.
A long-term federal and commercial agenda to gather power and profit in the name of “environment” at the expense of liberty has no constitutional foundation. The Tenth Amendment leaves to the states all governance responsibility for environment as no direct or indirect mention of it exists in the Constitution. Prudent protection of local environments by the states and the people does have justification in the Ninth Amendment’s protection of natural rights, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as formalized in the Declaration of Independence. The Feds need to butt out!
So, what should the people do now about climate, if anything? We must prepare to adapt to inevitable change, however unpredictable it may seem. We can recognize that production and use of our own domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear resources buys us time to meet these challenges and, at the same time, preserve our liberty.
We can develop far better surface and space observational techniques and use them consistently over decades to better understand the science of our Earth. On political time scales, we can quit taking actions with unknown and unintended consequences. We can choose sustained research and development of energy alternatives, those with clear paths to commercialization, rather than continue tax dollar subsidies and loan guarantees for premature or flawed introduction of politically motivated concepts. We can provide investment and business environments that will advance new sources of energy, particularly through reduction of personal and business income tax rates.
Basically, instead of being ideologically greedy and ignoring good science and economics, we can start being wise and truly concerned about our children, and their children, and the society in which they will live.
To the point and sensible article. Adaption to climate change is the only
option we have. The arrogant assumption that we can mitigate or halt changes by going back to living simple lifestyles and destroying everything that has been achieved so far is ludicrous but potentially far more devastating than a few degrees rise in temperature.
In other words, we could return to normal.
Mankind has been adapting to perfectly natural variations in weather for a long time. What is needed is to purge the psychologically immature who seek to control others from the political scene and make sure that those in office have the proper mindset to lead.
And, for reference, Obama and the current crop of Congresscritters don’t reach that standard.
It is hard to imagine that mankind can do much to prepare for an over heated earth. Fortunately that is an extremely unlikely scenario. But another ice age is almost a certainty at some point and is certainly more catastrophic than warming up a few degrees. Alternative energy sources will be needed since the only viable option would be to move large portions of food production in doors and possibly under ground. This would necessitate removal and supplementation of top soil from the glaciers’ paths (or hydroponics) and immense amounts of artificial lighting. Subterranean nuclear power or deep geothermal are the only viable options for this since vast amounts of the surface will be untenable.
Do you plan on stopping solar flares some how?
What we should do? Start building colony ships for the eventual supernova of our sun.
Fine article.
The planet naturally cycles above and below its long term, gradually rising trend line as it emerges from the Little Ice Age. Human activity is not measurable, or even discernible in the temperature record.
“Catastrophic AGW” [CAGW] is simply a means to raise taxes far higher than they could be raised otherwise, without this baseless scare tactic. Those who are expected to pay the much higher prices and taxes resulting from the CAGW scare [that's us] should be demanding that CAGW must first be shown to even exist. So far, that endeavor has been fruitless.
The current climate is entirely benign, and well within its natural historical parameters. The whole bogus CAGW tax grab is based on non-science, and on reprehensible public alarmism.
The last 10,000 Years has been extremely mild for the earth compared to other time periods. This lull has allowed humanity to establish itself and technology to accelerate in linear moves. We would never have made it this far if not for earth being in sleepy and calm period.
Most people don’t study history, archeology or astronomy. there is a sense that the earth will never change, that tomorrow will be the same as today..even a light study of the heavens or our past reveals that massive upheavals occur on a regular basis, enough to wipe out all and start again. It has happened several times in our past, it will happen in our future.
All needed is a single moderate historical volcanic eruption, one moderate solar flare, small asteroid or larger comet….and earth resets and we find ourselves fetching water from ground wells and burning wood for heat and to cook with. No more internet, no more blogging , no more, no more.
The earth is a far rarer gift than we realize, even rarer has been the peace and calm that allowed humanity to prosper.
We continue doing what we have been doing throughout history. We invent. Air conditioning, Furnaces, airplanes, cars, etc. We just keep on keepin’ on.
At this point, I think the whole issue is political.
For realists, there is value in true weather understanding.
But, I think those of us on the vanguard of freedom and opposition to totalitarian weather control should be careful when accepting any premise that will be used by the weather control lobby to support their agenda.
The world “view” is very constricted, and the soundbite becomes, ” Even sceptics accept …. the following premise”.
I recommend the approach of: adapt to the weather and live in freedom from repression.
As always, Dr. Schmitt hits the nail on the head.
As one of Murphy’s Laws states, “Under any experimental constraints and/or controlled conditions, the phenomena will continue to do as it darned well pleases”. This is as true of Earth’s climate as it is of the an acid/base test with litmus paper. The best we can do is adapt to whatever Earth’s climate decides to do, based not on “Gaia consciousness” (one of the more egregious bits of pseudo-scientific mysticism since the German Romantic movement), but on the biosphere’s inevitable reactions to… the Sun.
My standard test of how serious, or knowledgeable, any “climate expert” is has always been their reaction to the idea of substituting nuclear and/or hydroelectric power for fossil fuels. If they react with horror followed by screeds about Holy Wind and Holy Sun, I know I am dealing with a mystic, not someone with actual useful ability. Unfortunately, the majority of the “warmists”, both in science and in government, fall into this category.
Oh, and PS to #4 Dean; It takes a minimum of ~2.4 solar masses available for a star to collapse into a nova, let alone a supernova, at the end of its life cycle; which takes several billion years, anyway. So I wouldn’t worry too much about us needing those colony ships anytime soon.
clear ether
eon
A Benjamin Franklin approach to questions of the environment and global climate change would be the simplest and the wisest:
“Waste not, want not.”
This aphorism is something we all can follow. It doesn’t require more taxes, doesn’t mandate more intrusion, and leaves no room for bureaucratic empire-building. Plus, it’s obviously effective.
Those who like their answers complicated and expensive won’t have much interest, but for the rest of us, a Franklin-approach seems like a good way to go.
Adaptivity to environment. What a concept. Someone should write a book about it.
Considering we have a few million years supply of energy resources in the US (oil, natural gas, oil shale, coal, uranium, thorium, etc.) and can simply manufacture hydrocarbons using electricity, surviving climate change is more about what to do when the climate turns cold. My tomatoes cannot grow and produce in cool weather. What we really need are strains that can do well in cooler climate conditions. First we start to really develop our energy resources and then we start developing crops that can survive and produce in the cool decades ahead. Heat then eat should be our motto.
Wikipedia TOBA CATASTROPHE (aka Population Bottleneck) to see how resiliant our species has been. And, how irrelevant race is. We are traced by DNA to a hardy group of approximately 10,000 who survived the Toba Catastrophe around 70,000 years ago.
I’ve been saying this for years: that the anthropogenic claim for any true warming was foolhardy if what we really faced was/is a challenge of natural proportions. I have argued this with at least one actual climate scientist and scores of my fellow environmentalists, only to end up losing all respect for those individuals.
These comments should be engraved somewhere, carved in stone or something. We need common-sense, science-based educational writing like this as an antidote to the emotional, fear-based, politically charged propaganda of the warmist movement (and it is a movement). No one favors ever-increasing pollution and degradation of the environment. But the history of centrally controlled economies (cf. Eastern Europe under Communism) shows that putting all the decisions in the hands of a politburo (or unelected czars) leads to even worse ecological outcomes. When the Iron Curtain was lifted in East Germany and other places, it revealed the most astounding toxic dumps and pollution! More central planning is not the answer.
Global Warming Is Hot Air.
Alex, I get your point, but really think a more likely prospect is a return to an ice age (over several centuries).
I live in Pennsylvania, less than 20 miles from the southernmost advance of the last glacial advance. If the glaciers were in White Haven, my little town of Mountain Top would only exist as a ski resort.
If we’re going to spend federal government money, how about spending it in such a way as to promote the development of cold-hardy crops. This would benefit mankind in the long run more than all the petit socialist schemes the left has trotted out so far.
Dean: Sol does not have the mass to supernova. Instead, is will swell into a red giant, possibly out to Earth’s orbit. That will be an ecological disaster, don’t you think? In the end, Sol will shrink to a white dwarf and what remains will appear observers light years away (if there are any) as an object we call a planetary nebula. That is predicted to occur in the next one to five billion years. Better start planning now.
You tell them, Senator.
But allow me to refine your point about understanding natural cycles. As a young science editor in the 70s, I pursued a project–in those days when satellite imaging and sensing were just getting underway–with a pair of paleo-climatologists. From study of charts of weather cycles, they stated that we were nearing the end of an unusual 60-year cycle of the *most moderate* weather experienced in the entire Holocene and would slowly be entering a pattern of *more normal* weather variability.
You can actually see what they are talking about on temperature graphs of the last century or two, particularly on charts showing not just the mean annual temp but the summer high and winter low. From after WWI until about 1980, the zigs and zags reduce in amplitude then begin to increase again. As the authors (names long forgotten) pointed out, such favorable weather produced an untold economic boon for agriculture, insurance and other sectors sensitive to weather.
Because their prediction has borne out so visibly, it is almost certain that we are not experiencing Global Warming or any sort of Climate Change for the worse but an anticipated return to the weather norm. The greater seasonal variability will be costly–all the more reason not to run around wrecking the economy!
No less important is another way that Obama and his merry men are wanting to control our lives: health care.
So, here’s a cause that the Republicans should take up:
THE WAY to Really Call The Democrats’ Bluff and Save Us in the Process
Barak Obama just wants to give granny a pain killer, not treat her condition. And the state of Oregon would rather assist suicide than give one of its residents cancer treatments/medications.
In response, here’s what we do:
Introduce and pass legislation that would prevent the Federal government, or any of its agencies, from harming us, killing us, or otherwise prevent us from receiving life-preserving treatment, as a matter of its operating any sort of health care system.
Push for a constitutional amendment. Really raise as much stink as possible.
Credit Rose Pappas, senior citizen, Chicago, Illinois.
Let’s get behind this. I have a premium membership with Rush and have already emailed him. If you have access to Glenn Beck and/or Sean Hannity and/or Mark Levin through premium membership, please email them.
As the climate changes, we’ll do what humans have always done, we’ll adapt, overcome, and persevere. To think we can control the climate is hubris.
GpH, I stand corrected. And after doing a little intertube searching, I have discovered that we only have a billion years before the increase in the suns temperature would cause enough global warming to make it very uncomfortable; almost like a sauna until the water runs out. So, we really only have less than 1 billion years to get those colony cruisers online. We are so screwed!
Larry J,
Exactly! While we’re adapting, we should instead concentrate on “preventing” the near term natural diasters like earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis and asteroid strikes, etc.
Global warming is a fabrication to give the environmentalist-liberal-wackos power and grant the peoples money for their purposes. Al “Nobel Prize Winner” Gore, the godfather of climate hysteria, is in isolation “on the mattreses” as another of his wild b.s. claims unravel (this one about global warming causing the seas to swallow us up.) The study published in 2009 Global Geoscience, allegedly confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea level would rise due to climate change. The reason scientists were forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two “technical” MISTAKES that undermine the findings. Combining this with the damning e-mails from researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. The e-mails were an organized attempt to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, to manipulate data to fit preconceived conclusions and to discredit and shun reputable critics. One by one Gore’s apocolyptic prophecies of dooom and those of climate charlatans he inspired are being exposed as the work of con artists. Gore’s silence speaks volumes and he is running out of his nine lives.
Dr. Schmitt said:
“All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.”
I’m not sure where he get’s his data. As a scientist he should know how to reference his sources. Anyhow, here is the graph I found on solar activity versus temperature:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
That doesn’t look correlated to me. It looks anti-correllated if anything.
Adaptation….what a concept!
While we are trying to change the climate, let’s also see what we can do about those pesky black holes. And what are we doing about plate tectonics. What will happen when L.A. is a suburb of Anchorage?
Oh no, now I’m worried again.
“Just because AGW is a fraud doesn’t mean that we should ignore the natural and cyclical changes in the Earth’s temperature.”
YES IT DOES!
“Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660.”
According to WHAT? Do you have a temperature record to back this up? Or, are you basing it on PROXIES? How do you determine the validity/reliability of a proxy without a MEASURED temperature record to compare it to?
Where’s your temperature record?
“We can develop far better surface and space observational techniques ”
Why bother if you can rely upon the information we already have? I’m not saying that I think the information we already have is credible. But, you obviously do. You refer to it (sans citation) here at the top of this very article. If your confident in your statements about how the temperature has increased, why would you need “better … observational techniques”? You defeat your own argument.
Paul, you gave a ‘reference’ to dispute the article from one of the fraudulent sources!! It doesn’t work that way; you can’t use fraudulent data to prove your wish/agenda.
Also, what surprises me is that this article has to be written in the first place. We used to be taught things like cyclical climate change and the physical laws of conservation in school. So most of us saw the fraud from the very beginning. I guess now the schools are too busy teaching ‘more important things’ like how to put condoms on bananas.
KevDev
What is required is honest temperature and weather observation reporting, Not the 10% selected probes, located next to heat exchangers and adjacent to black-toped parking lots, as has been the recent trend in NOAA’s reporting.
An independent watchdog group found some 84% of NOAA’s weather collecting installations don’t even meet their own minimum requirements. When these facts surfaced, NOAA shutdown ALL ACCESS to their sites, something the has NEVER been done in the hundred years of the organization. What message does that send?
Ask anyone you know if they think last year was warmer or cooler? Hands-down the answer is cooler, yet NOAA says it was record hot!?!?!?! WTF?
Garbage in. Garbage out.
There is no point in funding NOAA , if all we get out of them is political ideology spun data.
#25 Paul — That doesn’t look correlated to me. It looks anti-correlated if anything.
Magnetosphere, solar wind, cosmic rays, Svensmark, among others. Do some homework. Dr. Schmitt is correct.
Wow — common sense to global warming — how refreshing. Can we have some more common sense, please? So needed in this arena.
Actually there are many programs storehousing crop seeds, research materials, DNA, basically the wealth of human Existence. Its a good idea, nobody knows what tomorrow brings.
Most climate change is pretty severe, occurs in a decade, not centuries, unless it is due to volcanic or asteroid, then its a few hours.
My state of residence, minnesota, is described as antartica in the winter and vietnam in the summer. When a 120 degree temp range is not unheard of in any given year, all this hand-wringing about a degree or so every few decades is pretty silly.
If we have learned anything, it is that our scientific community is unable to accurately track or predict global climate. Whether due to political or technological factors is irrelevant.
Bottom line: Man has survived all these millenia by using technology and migration to deal with the weather. Just because we are weak in spirit and mind compared to our ancestors doesn’t mean we can’t handle the weather anymore…
“ideologically greedy” … (in the last sentence)
Thank you for that phrase, Dr. Schmitt. It’s widely applicable.
Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. !!!
That is absolutely pure BS, as has been the case with every pinheaded claim of “AGW” being fraud, no exceptions.
“What We Should Be Doing About Natural Climate Change?”
NOTHING! Absolutely nothing! Let nature take its course, period. Adapt as you can, as it will go, whatever direction. And do not worry (too much) for future hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions years from now!
Toward the end of his article, the author sank to total “we-ism.” Who the hell he thinks those “WE” are or suppose to be? Government bureaucrats? Yea, believe them, they proved how much they can take care of such things! Other thieves and profiteers of scared public? WHO??
While I do see warming as having happened – when did the Thames last freeze over enough to have a weeks-long fair? – I do not think humans have all that much to do with it, excepting “microclimate” changes affecting areas roughly the size of Texas or smaller.
Thus I do not agree with Professor Lomborg, who believes in AGW. BUT his proposals largely are not only considerably cheaper than curent proposals from politicians world-wide, they also would be useable whether global temps go up or down! They also are far more humanitarian – rather than, say, the US cutting technology to Nineteenth Century levels, build power and water (eg desalinization) capacity where it currently is in short-to-nonexistent supply.
er, in a PDF published today Prof Lomborg intimates human CO2 output runs about 30 billion tons per year. Is that correct? And if so, is he – or the likes of James Hansen – aware that in the early 1980s the estimated CO2 output of TERMITES was calculated at about 50 billion tons?
one word..
ADAPT!!!
For those interested:
Re:32
Magnetosphere and Solar Wind and Svensmark:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Svensmark-Friis-Christensen-rebut-Lockwood-solar-paper.html
Not that I wish to nitpick the Good Senator, but phrases such as “Nature’s attempts to restore heat balance” tend to turn me off. Anthropomorphization and such. I’ll chalk it up to speaking to the Greeks in their language.
Don51 (#11): “Adaptivity to environment. What a concept. Someone should write a book about it.”
Significant climate changes are anthropogenic. Until now, there has been no significant climate change, and thus no need for organisms to adapt and evolve. Thus that Darwin nonsense about evolution through survival of the fittest explaining the diversity of species is bunk. The existence of so many species can only be explained by a Creation.
In short, AGW = Creationism.
First, I am not the ‘Dean’ in post #4. Second, to ‘BC’; read ‘On the Credibility of Climate Research’ by Dr. Judith Curry, posted at the ‘Watts Up With That?’ site; the science of AGW is not ‘settled’.
I would like to add that we need to realize that responding to AGW in the manner proposed by various governments and NGOs will DECREASE our ability to respond to any actual climate change, or for that matter to respond to hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos, tidal waves, meteor impacts, or invasion from outer space by giant break-dancing rabbits.
The restrictions required to respond to AGW would mean fewer aircraft carriers, transport planes, satellites, stocks of MRE’s, personal 4X4 vehicles, emergency generators, repair and rescue crews – you name it. In my neighborhood the year before last we had 34 inches of rain in 3 days and 4X4 vehicles became necessities rather than toys.
Cap and Trade and the like would replace useful items with legions of bureaucrats, lawyers, fat cat 3rd world leaders, and and corrupt scientists doing impressions of Dr. Strangelove. It’s better to be rich than poor when Mother Nature gets cranky.
Hey folks! There is nothing we can do about natural climate change except get ready for much colder climate. On the scale of time and earth history, it is time to get cooler. But think of all of the energy we will save by not having air conditioning in the summer. The next way to go green. But then we will have to cut down the trees for fires to get warm. It is kind of an Inconvenient Truth.
First thing to do is get climatologists a new job with something else to worry about. Having a group who works for grants will always continue the same old story just to keep the grant money coming in, who wouldn’t. That is the crux of the matter isn’t it? The Global Warming folks saw a wagon that hey could hitch them selves to, it keep the funds coming in, sure they had to fudge the numbers to keep the funding flow.
5. Thermo Geddon:
.. “Catastrophic AGW” [CAGW] ..
____
CAGW is the wrong acronym.
The correct acronym is CACA (catastrophic anthropogenic climate alteration).
Very nice information.