By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press
Over 50 years ago H.L.Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Nothing is more imaginary than the claim that CO2 is causing global warming and the proposal designed to lead us to safety is unnecessary and will create real problems. Imagine basing a major global policy on the output of a grossly simplistic computer model of a very complex system. Worse, the model considers only one miniscule variable known to have no effect while it ignores the major variables. In any area of science, social science or politics the insanity would be soundly rejected. However, that is what the entire world is planning to do with global energy policy to counteract the non-existent problem of global warming. It is non-existent because the world has cooled since 2000 as CO2 increased and temperatures correlate with changes in the sun. Many climate experts expect the cooling to continue at least until 2030. Why? What is their evidence it is the sun?The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) is responsible for providing the hobgoblin of global warming. They claim CO2 is almost the sole cause of warming while effectively ignoring the sun. Their claim that the sun is of little consequence is unbelievable and only a measure of their deception and lousy science. They only looked at one part of solar influence on weather and climate and didn’t do that accurately. Instead they used it to support their claim the temperature changes are not caused by the sun and therefore must be due to CO2. They only considered irradiance (heat and light) and concluded, incorrectly, it was of little consequence. They assume, because the variation is approximately 0.1% over approximately a 30-year period, it is of little consequence. The number certainly seems small when expressed as a percentage of 100. However, it is estimated that only a 6% variation is sufficient to explain all known temperature variation in the history of the Earth. So 0.1% is significant in relation to 6%. To put this in context consider how much the temperature drops between night and day or even for the brief period of a total eclipse. As solar and climate scientist Willie Soon said, “We have known for 80 years that even small changes in solar radiation have a strong effect on Earth’s temperature and climate.” The IPCC do not include changes in sun/earth relationships collectively called the Milankovitch effect, a major cause of temperature change. They ignore the high correlation between sunspots and global temperature which has a warmer Earth with many sunspots and colder with fewer. They claimed, legitimately, you must not assume cause and effect. However, they made the illegitimate claim there was no mechanism and the research was not produced in time to meet their deadline for inclusion. Both claims are wrong. A proposed mechanism first appeared in Science in 1991 when Christensen and Lassen published “Length of the Solar Cycle: An indicator of solar activity closely associated with Climate.” Since then several articles appeared elaborating on the mechanism, most before the IPCC deadline. Why did they ignore it? Likely because it showed the sun explained temperature changes. Typical of the pattern of their manipulations they did break the deadline rule when it suited their argument. Here is how what is known as the Cosmic Theory works. Cosmic radiation (CR) streams to earth but passes through the Sun’s magnetic field to get here. The amount reaching the earth varies as the strength of that magnetic field varies. Variation in sunspot numbers is visible evidence of changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. The CR reaches the Earth’s atmosphere where electrons are set free and in the lower atmosphere act as condensation nuclei. For water vapor (gas) to become a liquid the air must cool below the dew point temperature but there must also be nuclei around which it can form. The nuclei are microscopic and the water droplets formed are also very small. It takes about 1 million of them to form a medium sized raindrop. Because they’re so small and light they remain in the air but are collectively visible as clouds. We have known for some time of a disparity between the amount of cloud that forms and the available nuclei. CR acting as nuclei explains the discrepancy. The amount of low cloud cover varies as the amount of CR reaching the lower atmosphere varies as this diagram shows.
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| Clouds: blue line. Cosmic radiation: red line. Source; Extension oforiginal plot from Marsh and Svensmark, 2000. |
Low cloud cover blocks sunlight reaching the Earth thus creating cooling. No cloud cover and more sun heats the Earth’s surface creating warming. The cloud acts like a screen covering the windows in a greenhouse to block sunlight. Sunspot numbers reached a peak in the 1990s and have declined since. We are currently in Cycle 23 and entering Cycle 24. We know that the longer time between 11-year cycles the lower the number of sunspots in the next cycle. It’s now almost a century since the last similar low numbers. (see 1900 in the diagram). Just several more days without sunspots will give us a delay similar to that of the Dalton Minimum from 1800 to 1820. This was a very cold period that profoundly influenced the work of Charles Dickens (b. 1812) because of frequent and prolonged snow in London during his childhood and crop failures that created the social conditions he wrote about so eloquently. It won’t take a much longer delay for conditions to equal those of the Maunder minimum of sunspot numbers from 1645 to 1715, which coincided with the Little Ice Age.
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| Past and projected sunspot numbers. Source: Badalyan, Obridko and Sykora. |
We’re already experiencing the cooler weather and the pattern is expected to continue at least until 2020 even if Cycle 24 shows up now. As it cools politicians continue to prepare for warming – the wrong hobgoblin designed by the IPCC.