Scott Spiegel

As the Senate gears up to introduce its version of the House’s cap-and-trade global warming legislation next week, it’s instructive to consider the impact of myriad geological, meteorological, and astronomic effects on climate change, as exhaustively chronicled in Australian scientist Ian Plimer’s essential new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Plimer’s book, published last year, boasts 2,000 footnotes from an array of sources including top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Research Letters; journals on solar physics, hydrological science, and glaciology; books on climate change, environmentalism, and the history of science; and research by dozens of climate change skeptics.  Plimer also dissects the various contradictory iterations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports.

His evaluation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?  Pure, unadulterated waffle.

If “agnostic” is to “atheist” what “skeptic” is to “denier,” then Plimer would happily plant himself in the denier camp.

Plimer demolishes AGW by broadening the scientific timeline under consideration to incorporate thousands, at times millions, of years to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, and all in the absence of disposable Starbucks cups.

In graph after graph, Plimer depicts the cyclical effects of sunspots, glaciation, tilts in the earth’s orbit, ocean currents, CO2 reabsorption by the oceans, plate tectonics, clouds, and volcanic eruptions on global temperature.  He covers the Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 AD, which was warmer than today, and points out the vastly higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during previous Ice Ages.  He details the beneficial effects that warmer periods historically have had on crop growth, species survival, and human longevity.  He documents the inadequacy and inconsistency of land temperature measurements, relative to satellite measurements, the latter of which show global cooling.  He notes the utter failure of any global warming model to correctly predict that the earth would start cooling in 1998.

Plimer mentions Al Gore’s camp classic An Inconvenient Truth, and cites a British court’s 2007 ruling that there are nine major factual errors in the movie, and that in order to be shown in public classrooms the film has to be accompanied by a written manual and teacher instruction to correct all of the alarmist falsehoods.  One of the nine gaffes is the movie’s failure to note that CO2 emissions have not been shown to cause temperature increases, but rather have historically lagged behind temperature increases.  That’s right—a British court actually ruled that there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions, human or otherwise, cause or even precede temperature increases—only that they lag slightly behind.

And Plimer’s book was published before last November’s Climategate, in which a whistleblower in the UK publicly exposed researchers from one of the three leading climate data collection centers in the world as having evaded Freedom of Information requests, colluded to keep skeptics’ research from being published, and failed to be able to reconstruct tortuous data manipulations they had applied in order to generate the conclusions they wanted.

Lest closed-minded warmists dismiss Plimer as a religious, right-wing knuckle-dragger, Plimer has also authored books deconstructing the scientific case for creationism, and has received criticism from conservatives for this line of work.

Plimer’s thesis also happens to be perfectly embodied by last week’s historic volcano eruption in Iceland.  The eruption at Eyjafjallajökull, whose name is almost as long and complicated as the House’s cap-and-trade bill, left Europe covered in clouds of dark ash and shut down virtually all air transportation across the continent.

In his book, Plimer delineates the historic effects of volcanic activity on climate.  For example, in just a few days, a major volcano can spew more CO2, dust, and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere than humans can in a year.  Yet significant volcanic eruptions typically lead to years-long drops in temperature, due to the extra cloud cover and solar reflection they create, which means that skiing in St. Moritz should be lovely this winter.

Last year the Australian parliament considered and, in large part thanks to the efforts of Plimer and other skeptics, narrowly rejected a cap-and-trade scheme that would have crippled the continent’s energy production systems.

Due to U.S. Congressional Democrats’ politically suicidal stubbornness, cap-and-trade is evidently going to be this year’s health care reform.

To reiterate the point crystallized in Plimer’s book: if there’s so much uncertainty regarding whether human carbon dioxide emissions have any measurable influence on temperature increases, and a greater probability that temperature increases are beneficial than harmful, why are we rushing to shoot the world’s greatest economies in the foot?

Molecular biologist Henry Miller wrote in Forbes last week, “Every schoolchild these days seems to be a devoted environmentalist, able to spell ‘sustainable’ before ‘dog.’  However, much of the indoctrination about environmentalism—especially in schools—is of the passion-is-more-important-than-fact variety…  Too often the objective of student projects seems to be ‘empowering’ the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right answer and learning scientific principles.”  In other words, the first step to “empowerment” in the natural world is learning what you can and can’t change through being empowered.  It seems many adults have yet to learn that lesson.

Though I regret the disruption caused by Eyjafjallajökull to Western Europe’s economies (such as they are), I have to chuckle at the fact that terrible, wasteful, carbon dioxide-emitting air travel has been suspended throughout the sacred Continent of the Greens—and during the same week as Earth Day, at that.  I only wish it had happened right before the Copenhagen summit.



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• US Senate climate bill to be unveiled April 26 (alertnet.org)
• Jobs, jobs, jobs … uh, climate change? (qando.net)
• Iceland’s volcano: 9 strange facts (theweek.com)
• Climategate: a scandal that won’t go away (telegraph.co.uk)
• A Seasoned Veteran’s View of the IPCC (nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com)

Paul Krugman says of the U.S. Representatives who recently voted against the climate change bill: “[I]if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians… carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided… they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.”

Well, that’s what one Australian Senator, Steve Fielding, recently did in advance of the Australian Senate’s vote on a national emissions trading scheme.  In addition to a fact-finding trip to the U.S., Fielding prepared a series of questions for Australia’s “Minister for Climate Change and Water,” Senator Penny Wong:

Is it the case that CO₂ increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period?

Wong: “When climate change scientists talk about global warming they mean warming of the climate system as a whole, which includes the atmosphere, the oceans, and the cryosphere (ice, snow and frozen ground)…  [A]t time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend…”

Then how do we know warming is happening?  Do we know which factors are “masking” atmospheric warming and to what extent?  If not, how do we know atmospheric cooling isn’t taking place, and natural variability in the other direction isn’t “masking” that?

Wong adds, “[T]he year 1998 was unusually warm…  [T]he use of a highly unusual year to begin the trend analysis will also give misleading results.”  What about the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which emissions increased yet atmospheric temperature cooled?  Were the 1940s “a highly unusual decade”?

On ocean temperatures: “[O]nly about five percent of the warming since 1960 has taken place in the air…  Most of warming [sic] since 1960 (about 85 percent) has happened in the oceans.”

In an article last year, NPR reported, “Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message.  These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years” and have even cooled.  Their explanation: “[H]eat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air”—you remember, the air that Wong admits has absorbed only 5% of all warming.

NPR continues: “One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded—and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.”  No doubt these same scientists would have been just as vigilant in calling into question their entire data collection operation had it produced exactly the results they had predicted!

NPR: “The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.”

Let’s see: the Earth has its own atmospheric intermediaries that can nullify the entire influence of mankind on Earth’s temperatures—or not, depending on factors no one understands; and just to be safe, we should destroy industrial civilization.  How about we postpone the obliteration of 21^st century living standards until climatologists get sick of playing with their cute diving robots and start measuring things that actually affect the climate?

With respect to the cryosphere, Wong writes, “Since 1998 there has been continued decline in Arctic sea ice, reduction in the area of snow and frozen ground, melting of glaciers and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.”

In May 2009, Czech physicist Luboš Motl documented that “global sea ice remains substantially above the normal” level for the month.  According to engineer Dennis Chamberland, as of 2009, glaciers are growing in: Norway, Canada, France, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Switzerland, Kirghizstan, and Russia.  Glaciers are growing in New Zealand, including all glaciers in the Southern Alps.  In the U.S., glaciers are growing in Colorado, Washington, California, Montana, and Alaska.  In Antarctica in 2007, ice had grown to record levels since data collection began.  Greenland’s icecap is growing at the rate of 7.2 miles a year.  Science magazine reported in 2005 that the Greenland ice sheet is growing thicker.

So Wong seems to have comprehensively flunked Fielding’s Question #1.

Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998… was not unusual in either rate or magnitude as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?

Wong: “[B]etween ice ages and warm inter-glacial periods temperatures increased by 4 to 7°C.  However this was a gradual process taking approximately 5,000 years…  Globally, the Earth has already experienced warming of 0.76°C since 1850…”

The period from 1850-2009 is 1/30^th the length of the 5,000-year period Wong references.  Presumably global temperatures over 5,000 years fluctuate.  So how do we know the global warming from 1850-2009—a “blink of an eye” by Wong’s standard—will continue at the same rate?  How do we know we’re not approaching a local maximum and that temperatures won’t start to decline soon?

Is it the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming… followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?

Wong: “It is not the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature…”  Rather, simulations collectively predicted an increase “on average.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to see which models predicted what actually happened and which didn’t, and what the models that were right predicted from 2008 on.

John Brignell recently compiled a list of 598 outcomes of global warming cited by environmental alarmists.  A few include: anxiety attacks, childhood insomnia, depression, early marriages, extreme changes to California, flesh-eating disease, heart attacks, lawsuits increasing, and psychiatric illness; all of which I propose had a causal influence in Michael Jackson’s death.

Maybe there’s a U.S. Senator brave enough to question and research the science of global warming before the Senate’s vote on the climate change bill.  If this thing is real, we can’t afford to lose too many more celebrities.