Climate change numbers

I try to explain climate arguments leaving out numbers.  But they are the lifeblood of any science so here are a few very interesting measures.  The #1 greenhouse gas isn’t CO2 but H2O vapor.  There is 540 times as much water vapor as CO2 (only .00039 of the atmosphere) in the atmosphere and it is 10 times as effective in greenhouse entrapment.  So why aren’t manmade global warming advocates screaming about irrigation and over-forestation? Methane is an even smaller trace element and accounts for less than 1% of greenhouse warming (water =90%, CO2= 3.5%).  Atmospheric composition is roughly 390 parts per million of CO2 up from 270ppm  in 1600AD before the industrial revolution.  Sometime around the year 2100 CO2 will reach double the pre-industrial revolution output.  (These are all numbers from the andogenitive global warming advocates.)  The global warming models are very complex concerning how air of various temperatures and pressures variously absorbs radiation of varying wavelengths.  So if we double CO2 the average computer model says the rate of reduction of Earth’s cooling will be about 3.7 watts per square meter. This compares to satellite measurements of  total lost to space power of 235-245 watts/ sq. m (inexact).  3.7 watts/sq. m. works out to global warming of about a degree Celsius. But atmospheric convection at high altitudes lowers this to about 0.5 degrees.  James Hansen of NASA, a manmade warming advocate also estimates that there are other factors lowering the 3.7W/m2 to about 0.8 W/m2.  That’s just a fraction of a degree, not nearly enough to create the 2 to 4.5 degree estimates of warming they are predicting.

            So how do the modelers get 2 to 4.5 degree temp increases? They propose that the warming amplifies itself. Some propose an almost runaway warming with even larger than 4.5 degree increases.  But no one knows for sure if a little warming leads to a lot.  It’s a problem of estimating the feedback. 

            One of these feedback effects involves glaciation.  If warming melts glaciers, but increases snowfall atop them, they actually will grow during a warm era. Negative feedback. (There has been a huge discussion of this and conclusion is that the expansion or contraction of glaciers, both occurring around the world, is unknown and probably not related to CO2.) Another folly was the hockey stick graph, which showed flat temps for the last 2000 years but then suddenly rising since 1900.  This counters all the old anecdotal evidence of Europe’s Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming.  The hockey stick temperature graph was derived from tree ring data that tried to link tree growth with temperature in arid western N. America.  But we know that desert trees care far less about temp than water.  So it was a bad non-causal correlation.  The hockey stick graph is history. 

            Think of clouds.  If we get less clouds, it is reasoned, the sun beats down the earth warms.  But counter-intuitively this isn’t so.  Think of a cooling of the oceans.  The wind blows and cools the oceans like wind blowing across your wet skin.  But this increases the moisture in the atmosphere which makes clouds and rain, which in turn releases the heat into the atmosphere.  So the earth might seem to have a temp regulator in water vapor—cool the ocean and you get warmer atmosphere.  Warm the ocean and you get a cooler atmosphere.  There are other natural effects.  Some may produce positive feedback while oceans and clouds may produce negative feedback. 

            We know a bit about some big ones.  There is a prominent oscillation of current and wind patterns in the northern Pacific called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO.  The negative cycle produces much more cloud cover worldwide.  Sometimes warm air from the south invades Alaska, sometimes polar air.  And the PDO goes back and forth about every 30 years.  [other oscillations in the Atlantic with hundred year cycles]  The PDO brings different cloud cover and factoring this into a model, it almost perfectly fits the temperature data that suggest 0.7 degree increase since about 1900.  This is especially interesting since there was a big temperature run-up before 1940, then an abatement until the mid seventies.  If you accept standard global warming via CO2, you are forced to ask why was there so much temperature increase prior to 1940 when CO2 emissions were slight but just as they really kicked in about 1945, we got cooling for 30 years?  Recently, there has also been research that proves that increasing CO2 increases upper atmosphere clouds that deflect sunlight in the tropic regions.  This is a huge negative feedback that has the research camps now divided into the CO2 only models versus the scientists who argue that we can’t neglect natural forcings and feedbacks.

            Complicating all this is money.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, is a big benefactor of research money that has kept the CO2 modelers in vogue, while shutting out the natural effects folks.  This is a rare situation in science, akin to the scholastic school of medieval scholars who shut out Kepler and Galileo.  But ultimately science is about truth and not where government money goes.  We’ll just have to see where truth leads. 

Global warming and the Wood experiment

1909 Johns Hopkins physicist, R.W. Wood did an experiment that disproved “The Greenhouse Effect” for greenhouses.  That is, greenhouses mainly heat by trapping convection (air exchange), not by trapping infrared (heat) re-radiated. In as sense, the effect is misnamed. This has ticked-off global warming enthusiasts for years.  In 1980, physicist Vaughan Pratt of Stanford tried to duplicate the experiment and pronounced it a failure. Global warming enthusiasts rejoiced.  The heck of it is, they only read the headlines.  I laugh because I have done the experiment many times and Wood was basically right but a greenhouse is not an atmosphere.  Pratt was correct too. Put on your thinking cap and realize that climate change is terrifically complex. 

            Wood's experiment tried to test the effect of a visible-light transmitting glazing that won’t transmit infrared (heat) and compare it to one that will.  Glass won’t transmit heat, rock salt will.  So he built two “greenhouses” of insultated cardboard, one with a glass cover and the other with a slab of rock salt.  Set both in the sunshine and they both heat to about 130 F. Pratt built similar vessels and emplaced a number of thermocouples at various heights within the interior and found some differences in various vertical temp measurements of the two.  More heat was trapped under glass. 

            Well, that’s what you’d expect.  The glass greenhouse not only traps convection but also infrared radiation.  But the difference is not large in the two final enclosures.  What this shows is that convection is the larger method of transfer.  And because of this, you can make a greenhouse out of acrylic or polycyanurate or a host of plastics (Ha! even visqueen plastic) that are often used today as a substitute for glass without regard to heat losses due to infrared radiation losses.  It explains why, when you sit next to a large window on a cold night you get a draft.  The room air convects over the surface of the window and descends as cold air.  Convection counts for 90% of the transfer!  And this also explains why you can spend a fortune on windows of low emissivity and it only changes the R-factor (heat transfer rate) from .61 to .68.  Add cellular shades and the R-factor goes up by 2.0 or 3.0. Open the window or the greenhouse door and all the heat goes out (convection). And so the windows and greenhouse industry has happily shrugged and used the Wood result. And Pratt noted the bigger importance of convection deep within his paper.

            Pratt’s right as well.  There is an infrared component and a difference in the Wood greenhouse's temps.  Moreover, the atmosphere is not a sheet of glazing.  The only way for the atmosphere to transmit energy to space is by radiation.  There is no convection.  So does atmospheric chemical composition make all the difference?  That’s where the naïve go wrong in supposition.  There are other trapping mechanisms and they apparently work in differing conditions giving surprising results.  Cloud cover is not constant but apparently increases with CO2 content predominantly in the tropical regions. This is Roy Spencer’s finding.  And the tops of clouds reflect about 98% of incoming radiation. (When we add CO2, the earth corrects somewhat) There may be other self-correcting traps.  Ocean currents affect only the upper 500 feet of the ocean.  Below that depth, very little temperature change is observed even though the oceans are almost uniformly14,000-18,000 feet deep. Several historic climate changes due to melting ice ages have shown that current changes have altered temperature in large amounts, over 10 times as much as CO2 compositon.  What’s going on? Is the lower temp of deep ocean water being tapped like a heat(cold) sink? This needs more study.  And what of overall solar radiation?  We now realize that the sun’s magnetic field must change but how and what does it do?  More study.  Mega-vulcanism?  More study.  Finally there’s the wobble of the earth, known as nutation that occurs every 100,000 years and correlates almost perfectly with the previous 26 ice ages.  Until we can understand at least all but the last effect, we should admit our ignorance of man’s effect on global warming.

            Oh, if you want to do the Wood experiment with your grandkids, you can use a flat plate of acrylic and a plate of clear glass to make your “greenhouse”. (Acrylics transmit part of the infrared spectrum)  Make sure you put the thermometers in the exact same location to equalize measurements.

Solar activity

OH, my!  Things are getting interesting concerning climate change and solar activity.  First a little primer.  There have been 26 ice ages in the last 3 million years that we can observe in deep ice core samples from Greenland.  The first 24 exactly match the earth’s nutations, every 100,000 years.  A nutation is when the earth’s axis wobbles between 22 and 24 degrees.  Like a spinning top which is not perfect, a little wobble has to occur every once in awhile for conservation of angular momentum.  It is thus thought that these wobbles cause climate disruption at the poles.  Since the poles are landlocked (Arctic) and sea-locked (Antarctic) we have ice caps on both ‘these days’ (speaking geologically).  And a climate disruption may dump large amounts of snow on these caps causing them to grow and the increased albedo (reflectance) of all that white causes further cooling, further snow, further buildup until a new ice age occurs. 

            The last two ice ages don’t correspond to nutation and were weaker.  Maybe earth is getting out of the ice ages as more exchange of waters is occurring in the Arctic as Eurasia and N. America grow wider apart via plate tectonics.  (Just conjecture.  Antarctica’s poles keep piling up more ice) But what of the other climate factors—ocean currents, albedo of atmosphere (cloud cover), solar radiation and the much discussed chemical make-up of the atmosphere?  Of these 4, solar activity seems most important.  A one percent decrease of solar radiation energy would cause a near ice age all by itself.  In 1309, lasting until about 1850, the sun went mysteriously depleted of sun spots.  Earth mean temp decreased 5-10 degrees F and the era is known as “the little ice age”.  It likely caused many phenoms like the decline of grain production in Europe, the uninhabitability of Greenland by Scandinavians, decline of fish production in Chinese rivers, and emergence of scavengers including rats that multiplied and carried bubonic plague across Eurasia. 

            Increasing CO2 no doubt changes the atmosphere, but our experience is increase of .8 degrees C (1 degree F) since 1880.  But the last 25 years of observation of solar activity is getting to be a bigger story.  The solar cycle of sun spot activity maxes every eleven years—1969, 1980, 1991, 2002, 2013.  The ’69 radiation measurements were lower than those of 1980, 1991, and 2002.  But the 2013 energy flux is lower than even 1969.  We don’t know if solar energy fluctuates every few cycles or few hundred years, as climate eras seem to indicate.  But whatever the case, sun activity swamps CO2.  The last 18 years have been cool.  Secondly, there is research that indicates that when solar activity minimizes, more neutrons are shed.  These enter our atmosphere and cause more cloud cover.  Other research indicates that increased CO2 makes the tropical atmosphere cloudier and thus more reflective.  Both are occurring now.  Sunspots declined from 1500 to 1000 from the max cycles of 1991 to the one in 2013.  Measure of solar magnetic field shows a similar decline.  But realize, we have sun spot recordings going back to about the year 1000 (Chinese monks) but solar magnetic fields for only a quarter century.

            What does this mean?  Cooler era or new ice age?  Best guess is just cooler temps.  But realize that the 100,000 year ice ages had roughly 12000 years of warm-up between, and that is about what we have used up now.  What it probably means is that Al Gore is going to eat crow.  He points out that Greenland is shedding ice rapidly.  True, but once a warming begins, Greenland is a huge ice cube—10,000 feet thick and 500,000 sq. miles.  If you put an ice cube under a heat lamp, how long does it last?  If you cool down or heat up a bit, it won’t have much effect on the melting.  So the Greenland ice and about half the declining glaciers may well have been on this course long before modern manmade CO2.  A cool spell would also be either a respite from the warming (allowing the private sector to come up with solutions to increased CO2 emissions like it has done by reducing USA’s output by 18% since 2000.)or it could be a long term trend like the Little Ice Age or Younger-Dryas of 10,000 years ago.  We will just have to find out.  

Stuff the news media should tell us

I suspect that a major reason the media doesn’t give oft-times vital information, is because they have such short time frames to write or speak and many lack analytical skills.  Years ago, I cashed in a few frequent flier points to sit 1^st class and I sat down next to Art Linkletter, age 90 at the time.  He told me exactly this. Here’s more stuff…

1.     China was 2% of world's manufacturing in 1991 but is 19% today. 1/5 of US middleclass job loss is due to this. Workers are far less willing to move today (loss of home value) or re-educate (US stresses 4 year degrees which is huge down time to get a bachelors) Therefore, many try to get on disability, now 5% of 25-64 yr. olds. Food stamps has gone from 17M in 2000 to 48M today.

2.     2.6M die each year, most by health conditions. 98K die from medical mistakes, 100K from falls and accidents, 38K drug overdoses, 30K vehicle accidents.  There are only 700 deaths per year from gun accidents, but 13,000 from gun crime.  Cocaine usage fell by half in the last 10 years but heroin has gone up 80%. Marijuana abuse in Colorado has increased by 25% among the elderly since they passed legalization.

3.     It’s the federal gov’t people are fed up with.  47% of voters this fall thought Fed Gov’t is too powerful; 61% think states should be able to opt out of fed mandates and programs if fed doesn’t pay for them. Only 26% want federal funding of elections.

4.     Since 70s, land temperature readings have gone 1.5 degrees higher, but 25degrees higher since 15,000 BC. At 10,800 BC was a -15 degree re-cooling called Younger Dryas that lasted 1300 years, probably due to changed ocean circulation. Then two Sahara warmings @ 4400BC and 2200BC each lasting 150  years. (disputed causes) A  medieval warming 850-1300AD by 5 degrees, then a Little Ice Age (-8 degrees) 1309-1850 AD caused by lower solar output—known from sunspot occurance) Interglacial periods last 12,000-28,000 years. 39% of climatologists recently said they were convinced of manmade warming.

5.     In 1850, 80% of black children slaves lived with BOTH parents and this continued to 1950.  14% out-of-wedlock rate of 1950 has gone to 70% today. 7000 of 13,000 murders are committed by Af-Am who are 13% population. Half of 12^th graders function at 6^th grade. Teen unemployment was LESS than for whites in 1950s but is now 47%.  Black kids need Dads!  Take an unguided one under your wing, guys!

6.     Oklahoma Democrat vs. R’s in 1976 was 78% to 22% (don’t have statistics on Indies). 2016, 40 years later it is 41.5% to 45.5% in favor of R’s.  The use of marketing surveys with smart phone techniques is having a big impact on big elections—people reminding like-minded people to vote—Obama technique pioneered in 2008. Media doesn’t want you to know this. It circumvents them.

7.     Single mom, two kids (SM2K) can get assistance from TANF,WIC, Food stamps, Sect. 8 housing, and Medicaid, plus other state programs. If you make nothing $1500 a month aid is typical even in MS and AR when state is tightfisted. Earned Income Tax Credit declines as you make more than $9600 and you lose TANF.  At about 23K you lose food stamps and housing asst. Bottom line, most, but not all SM2Ks make $1500-$2000 per month no matter how poor they are.

8.     7% of men are molested sexually as kids.  46% of gay males were; 22% of gay women. Prison surveys show 86% of child molesters are gay/bi. 1.6% of population is gay; 0.7% bi—same as it has been for the last century.

9.     Save up.  30% of seniors >55 have no savings and 26% have less than $50K (9 months in nursing home).  ¼ living on retirement SS have only that. (SS retirement avg benefit is $1600/month)

10.  Racism is rare. In 1950 20% thought interracial marriage was okay.  Today it’s 90%.  Of the 10% who don’t, 2/3 cited no personal dislike but hardship on children or the couple.  That fits with 12 studies of Caucasian Americans over the last 20 years thought to be reputable—true racists are <3 3="" nbsp="" o:p="" of="" population.="" total.="">

Well, enough!  Don’t get me going on Obamacare, Islam, Taxation or Energy.  I can’t shut up.

Stuff Prez candidates should bring up

I simply do not understand why some things aren’t in the public discussion of politics.  If some Republican candidate would bring up these subjects, I guarantee it would cause a media stir and it would make him/her look like a genius. 

            Retirement.  70% of seniors say that retirement in USA is in a state of crisis.  Whenever you have 70% of anything in politics, that’s a huge issue and a sure winner for someone who gets on the right side of it.  Median savings upon retirement is $50,000.  Median SS income is $16,000.  Taking $3,000 a year out of savings gives a median income of $19,000 a year.  That’s food stamps territory.  Add health problems and see how far $19K goes.  To make matters worse, SS is collecting less than it pays out (since 2012) and left unchecked SS and MC will use up All discretionary budget funds by 2030.  “All” means no money for military, Post Office, national parks, Coast Guard rescue and a thousand other functions of government. 

            So a smart candidate needs to spell out a program.  Christie has tried this but he doesn’t spell it out in human terms that capture the dire consequences to the country.

            Military Recruitment and Education.  21 million young people are eligible for the military but we cannot recruit about 200,000 a year for the following reasons.  7 million are too obese.  6 million cannot pass the necessary tests, especially math. Many others have children or tattoos and crime records or other social/dependency problems. Our recruiters hand out lots of incentive bonuses, free college, career training, etc. yet we still fall beneath recruitment quotas every year. While physical/ health problems and social problems are a difficult problem interwoven in our society, failing a math test is just a matter of training for 99% or recruits.  What the hell is wrong with our education?! Of the 45 OECD countries (developed world) we are 28^th in math, 28^th in science, 17^th in reading.  If our local public schools can’t get it done, perhaps we need special military pre-schools that can teach stuff like how to add three 2-digit numbers in your head (necessary to assess windage corrections in rifle shooting).  Surely our kids are smarter than the ones from Appalachia and inner cities who fought bravely in Vietnam, aren’t they? I’d also relax the tattoo prohibitions in consultation with our military leaders.  Our country’s military is being forced out of existence by diabolical leadership.

            War on Women.  What women want is a society where they can freely develop a fulfilling life with their talents and destiny.  Pro-life is not war on women.  Cradle-to-grave security as a disguised form of dependency serfdom is a war on women.  You don’t become a true princess by sitting around sucking up benefits.

Climate Change.  About half the people believe that increased CO2 has caused a global warming, predicted to be 2 degrees in the next 100 years.  Chemical composition of the atmosphere, however, is just one of several effects postulated by scientists.  What someone needs to say in a debate is this.  Okay so you believe in 2 degrees due to CO2.  What about solar radiation?  It varies considerably more and we have historical records of it.  The Little Ice Age from 1309-1850 dropped temperatures 9 degrees.  The Medieval Warming was several degrees warmer.  And what about oceanic circulation.  When that changed during the Younger-Dryas 12,000 years ago, temperatures dropped 17 degrees.  And the nutation of earth’s rotation which changes axis tilt causes 30 degrees temperature drops and brings on ice ages.  Why is no one saying anything about this?  I’ll tell you why.  Because CO2 production is the only effect that allows politicians to call for socialism.  It is the only effect that government can make people feel guilty about so that government can tell you how to live and what to do.  This is how socialism works.  And does government ever truly fix anything?  I suggest we rely on private sector solutions to our CO2 production and tell government to get out of the road of the people!

            Islam. President Erdogan of Turkey, a key ally of ours, is also a conservative Muslim.  He says there is no such thing as moderate and radical Islam.  “Islam is Islam” he has said.  And there are aspects of Islam that order the followers to take over the entire world by peace or by force.  Then offer a few quotes of the Quran. Explain that these are non-abrogated passages. (Doctrine holds that there are false verses in their scripture that are overridden by later revelations.) “Terrorize the infidels and beleaguer them.  Cut off their heads and cut off their fingers.” Sura 9:3.  “Kill the infidels wherever you find them.” Sura 147:43.  Point out that the faith will not rest until Sharia Law supplants all other law.  So then the question becomes, will refugees from Syria live in quiet toleration of faiths in America?  We should only accept immigrants from Islamic states through meticulous screening and probably far less than the 200,000 that Obama is letting in from Syria.

            Liberty.  So many people say that we have a constitution based on Christianity or no religious origins. But if you ask where they got that info they are clueless.  But we founded this country on the principle of Liberty.  All the founders knew what Liberty was.  It was a term coined by John Locke, the father of modern psychology and a government philosopher who has two direct quotes in our Constitution and thoroughly influenced our founders.  Liberty means being able to follow the inner voice in your head, that is, follow your dreams, follow the Holy Spirit, follow your faith.  If you have a mission in life, be it from God or your own deduction, being allowed to follow it is the absolutely fundamental bedrock of our ideals and our Constitution.  No Liberty?  Then you are just a lousy serf of an overreaching government.   

            Try a few of these at the next debate and see if it doesn’t set off the Mainstream Media to gobbling like turkeys. And see if it doesn’t enthuse a few R voters.

Encyclical doubts

            Now let me think.  Abraham was rich.  God used his riches to found a clan that became a nation.  Joseph was kinda wealthy being prime minister of Egypt.  Ester, David, Obadiah, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea—all rich and God didn’t demand they give up everything they had to become better and more faithful. 

            Protestant theology holds that God comes after you, saves you and develops a relationship with you in order to use you to advance His   Kingdom.  There is not necessarily any requirement to give up everything and become a monk.  In fact, there are no Protestant monks.  Not that meditation and dedication to a life of mendicacy won’t help some folks.  It is just not a requirement of faith, that unique individual gift of God that takes you to a better spiritual life. 

            And this is no insult to my Catholic brothers in Christ, but I profoundly disagree with Pope Francis.  Pope Francis said “the 'theology of poverty' is based on the fact that Jesus -- in his divine richness -- became poor; he lowered himself and sacrificed himself to save humanity." Well, he also took the financial support of several rich women in the gospel of Luke.  Would the Pope have told him to decline that support?  Look, I don't want to quibble with Jesus’ humility.  But I do want to quibble with the dogma that one’s faith is not genuine if one doesn’t give away all worldly possessions.  Nor do I accept that one earns eternity by giving to the poor.  I do agree with Luther who cast a jaundiced eye on the riches of the church.  Luther said satirically in one of his 95 theses about the indulgences, “Since the Pope is rich as Crassus, why doesn’t he just buy his own indulgences and unlock all the people in hell?”

            Indeed I suspect that the theology of poverty is a construct to justify asking the peasants to cough up huge sums to fund the gilded sanctuaries.  And indeed the Catholic papacy over the years sided with autocratic monarchs (fellow lords) and tried to quell the nationalist movements of Europe.  Socialism?  That is just another attempt to keep the peasants tied to the manor.  Now our Argentinian Pope doesn’t mind talking up the Peronism.  Yuck! I long for John Paul II and his support for the freedom of mankind.  “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” 

            But now we get an Papal encyclical on Global Warming.  We are asked to sacrifice deeply to fend off the warmth.  I guess that means we use less fuel and shiver.  And make a huge contribution by sorting our aluminum cans into separate trash barrels.   Well, yes the world does seem to get warmer after each ice age.  Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show that every 100,000 years for the last 2.6 million years an ice age has occurred like clockwork.  That’s the period of the earth’s nutation where the axis tilts by varying from 22 to 24 degrees. (think of the spasms of a rotating top) And after each extensive glaciation, our best guess is that the earth warmed to about the temperature it has today   Each time the Warm lasts only a few thousand years and then Earth plunges back into the continental ice caps.  Now the last two ice ages suddenly disrupted this periodicity.  The last ice age began about 70,000 years ago and lasted until about 10,000 years ago.  Some speculate that the mechanism of nutation plus landlocked/sealocked poles is changing. Maybe we don’t get another glaciation for 20,000 years—or not.  So my suggestion to the pope is that he not base his theology on some nerdy computer models of atmospheric chemistry but be a bit more humble in giving God credit for the changes.  Earth seems to be getting colder the last two decades.  Maybe God is still in control.

            Sticking to the gospel would be the best policy.

Big climate discoveries in history

            I was thinking about the biggest discoveries of the past 30 years or so in our understanding of history.  I’m no archeologist but here’s my list of surprising finds of the recent era. 

            #1 is what happened to the Old Kingdom of Egypt.  It just disappeared for 150 years and then suddenly there were new pharaohs and a Middle Kingdom.  What happened?  If you go back to a textbook of about 1980 they tell you that there was a period of social unrest and chaos, rival families competed for the throne and there must have been wars.  Eventually a new dynasty arose and began to rule.  But no explanation.  They also did a huge expansion of canals and irrigation systems.  And they began to store large amounts of grain.  What we now realize is that the final Sahara Warming occurred about 2200 BC and silt studies of the Upper Nile show that a massive drought took place.  Think Larger than Dust Bowl sized drought that went on for at least 20 years.  Starvation indications in official records and city digs show that the nation was brought to desperation and chaos by just the simple lack of an annual flood.  The new pharaohs of the middle kingdom didn’t claim to have divine powers to make the annual flood of the Nile happen.  Smart move. This is like the time I was introduced to Jeff Buffalohead, Chairman of the Otoe tribe.  “Don’t call me chief!” he said.  “Chief means you own everything nobody else wants. Like Hey, Chief, your stray dog got in my trash! Are you going to clean it up.”

            #2 is the Mayas disappearance in the middle of the 800’s.  The great Mayan achievements of mathematics, astronomy and writing just disappeared.  And so did 90% of the population.  The people didn’t migrate elsewhere, as can be shown by both DNA sampling and demographic estimates. Their great cities have been surprisingly found, but these were mysteriously abandoned.  What happened the Mayas?  There were formerly dozens of theories about war and religious self-destruction and some sort of mystery diseases arriving on their shores.  But nothing fit until a Texas banker-turned-archeologist theorized that drought was the reason.  Indeed, he found many tell-tale signs like graneries emptied and abandoned, priests slaughtered by mobs, and cannibalism.  Then a geologic team found sediment cores from a swamp that had salt deposits that fit perfectly the timeline of the demise.  The swamp must have dried up extensively for at least a dozen years.  Other signs of ocean current changes that bring lesser droughts to the Yucatan were found as well.  So most of the Mayas disappeared from famine and drought, got into desperate fights that destroyed their civilization and left it to return into jungle. Of course, there are still about 1.5 million Maya remnant people in Guatemala today.  One Guatemalan guy I met said, “Yeah we were good in math but used a base 20 number system.  It was easy to count when people were barefoot.  And we had a zero, but kids hated it when they got that score on a test.”

            #3 is the Little Ice age of Europe.  From 1309 to 1324 it is estimated that temperatures declined by 10F from the warming in the 13^th century. Famines and the bubonic plague occurred.  In sudden cooling changes rodents expand in population because their predators die while they successfully retreat to burrows and shelter.  So how do we know that climate really changed?  Prior to 1300, grapes were extensively grown in England and you can’t do that anymore. Grain crops failed in wet cold climates.  There was an Indonesian volcano which blew its head off just prior to 1300 and this may have started the cycle.  But the sun was the real culprit.  How do we know?  Chinese priests studied sunspots which were necessary to their religion.  Right on time in 1309 they recorded in alarm that the sunspots had gone away.  Indeed their records show a dearth of sunspots well into the 1600’s when Europe began to observe.  When the sun’s output slows, sunspots decline because they are like solar magnetic storms on the surface.  Less energy, fewer spots.  The sunspots returned about 1850, and our modern era of warming has progressed since then. And we note that before 1850, Dickens wrote about Christmas snow in Christmas Carol which took place in London.  Snow today is rare in London.  Which is why London has Arabs for immigrants instead of Lapps.  

            The barbarian invasions are now thought to have resulted as climate changed in central Asia and forest belts shifted north by as much as 300 miles.   Old territories of certain tribes came under dispute and the barbarians were forced or by opportunity migrated.  The best example is the Magyars or Hungarians, a tribe of Gemanic peoples who spoke a unique and thus traceable language.  As their territory warmed, they went from forest dwellers to plains riders and invaded Europe in the 900s. 

            Bottom line: Early man had a hard time adapting to climate changes.  None were due to any CO2 output from modern industrialization.  Which proves that the earth has climate fluctuations of a large order, all due to natural causes.

            But if you don’t believe this, then you have to believe in one of my favorite cartoons.  3 cavemen standing on a mountain top looking out at an enormous glacier field.  First guy says, “Dang, this is all melting!” Second guy: “It’s all our fault!” 3^rd caveman: “We will just have to install socialism and tax the bejabbers out of ourselves.”

 

Climate Change Part II, science

About 1970 with the advent of large computers, scientists could, for the first time, do computer models of the atmosphere.  They could ask how much reflectivity and retention of heat occurred when certain chemicals were added or subtracted to an atmosphere.  So you might ask what happens if I have an atmosphere with a lot more methane as in the early days of the planet? Or before forests, in say, the Devonian age, CO2 was probably 20 times as high, so what would happen in the computer model if we changed that?  The answers were that increasing CO2 makes it warmer and increasing SO2 makes it colder.  Indeed CO2 can be produced by man.  The models predicted rapid temp increases the amount of CO2 could be radically increased.   Perhaps this could be produced by man due to modern activity and machines.  This speculation developed into a political issue since an obvious solution would be to limit CO2 output.  The Left could warn of dire climate changes caused by industrial progress and could attempt to control people (which is their real desire) and their emissions. But were the models correct?  Actual climate observations after CO2 emissions have been much less pronounced.

            The climatologists knew there were other effects.  Among them was cloud cover and haze.  Humidity or haze tends to trap heat while cloud clover tends to cool the climate.  The tops of clouds are 98% reflective—brilliant white.  So the obvious question: what’s the effect of increased clouds and can this be observed.  This is what the atmospheric scientists in conjunction with NASA were doing in flyovers of northern OK in the 90’s and bringing those atmospheric scientists to my hotel. 

            Ocean currents and changes are also important.  The oceans are 14,000-18,000 feet deep and fairly uniform in depth.  But only the upper 500 feet has currents and changes in temperature. Below that the water is uniformly cold. Since water holds 5 times the heat energy per volume as land, the oceans are the climate moderators of the earth.  But what if by some turbulence or other effect, some of the deep cold water is mixed with the surface? This would immediately change climate.  Or vice versa, what if the surface gets more laminar and less mixed?  Then you have more heat. 

            Finally there is solar radiation’s fluctuation .  This is least well-understood since we don’t know how the sun changes. Run models based on just 1% loss of radiation and climate changes disastrously.

            Now comes an important point.  The order of importance of each of these 4 effects (radiation, currents, clouds, chemistry) goes in reverse order.  In other words, we think solar radiation is the biggest effect.  After all it changed the Little Ice Age suddenly and radically.  Next in importance are oceanic effects that are suspected in the Dust Bowl, Younger-Dryas, and Sahara desertifications.  Next in importance are the clouds, finally the chemical content.  So then if CO2 changes are present, they may easily be outdone by the other changes.  Moreover it is not well-known how much man’s emissions of CO2 affect the entire amount.  Estimates of total CO2 in the atmosphere vary enormously, by a factor of ten!  When you see such unknowns in gathered data, it raises a red flag with most thoughtful scientists.  Then what is the amount of CO2 that is manmade?  Estimates vary widely again. You can see how some have concluded that Manmade Global Warming via CO2 emissions is a hoax or a miniscule effect.  And indeed, since about 1980 we have been measuring ocean temperatures.  From 1980 to 2000 about half a degree of warming was observed.  But then since 2000 we have lost about a quarter of a degree.  Something unknown caused the world to cool down.  Couldn’t be man’s activities since much of the 3^rd World has gone from bicycles to autos. So when you see folks like Senator Inhofe calling global warming a hoax, this is why.

Climate Change Part I, History

            I presented this at the Kay County Republican meeting, concerning climate change.  There are two parts, History and Science.  My expertise is not large but I can explain the issue.  When at KSU in the 70’s I was tapped to be temporary Librarian for the Weather Data Library-- oldest continuous weather records in the United.  Years later I ran a hotel and some of the top climate change scientists in the world frequented our area.  Due to some odd circumstances, word spread that a former colleague (not quite true!) ran a nice hotel.  We got lots of reservations and became something of a headquarters for the scientists who descended on Ponca City’s airport and Lamont’s climate station.  Result was a lot of evening discussions in the lobby.  One night Dr. Tim Tooman, Scripps Oceanographic Institute, author of the El Nino theory gave me a renditon of “the big picture” of the whole climate change controversy which will be in the Science section.  But first the History.

            The  largest climate changes are the ice ages that may have begun almost 3 million years ago.  Earth became 30-40 degrees cooler and glaciation covered half of the northern continents.  Oh, by the way, I don’t want to offend anyone’s faith.  If you believe in a 6000 year earth, just realize that if we make a road cut, there are artifacts that bespeak many years of a former history.  Now whether God just put this in the rocks as a virtual history or whether it is real—you decide.  And we can still talk in apparent years.

            Ice ages were 40-60,000 years long and had interludes of typically 140,000 years between when the climate was considerably warmer than today.  What caused them? We think the nutation of the earth (these wobbles occur every 17,000 years) could have been coupled with continental drift that made the poles landlocked is the reason.  Landlocking the Arctic Sea and the Antarctic continent means that poles can grow an ice cap. Then either a solar radiation change or nutation threw the planet into increasing glaciation as the polar caps reflected more and more sunlight back into space and drove temps down. But the jury is still out on some of this theory.  The last ice age ended roughly 20,000 years ago and the earth began to warm.

            About 11,700 years ago the Younger-Dryas era occurred where the warming reversed and became markedly colder.  Many large animals such as mastodons and sloths died during this era, like the ones you have seen as cartoons in the Ice Age movie.  (Younger-Dryas when the Scrat froze just inches from the tantalizing acorn?)  Younger-Dryas was also an era when we believe that Caucasians in N. America were either were killed or absorbed by Mongloid people from Eastern Siberia who became the Indians.  What caused this cold, dry era which lasted 1700 years?  One theory is that glacial melt which originally went down the Mississippi valley was captured by the St. Lawrence Valley and suddenly went north changing the ocean current patterns and causing a very cold era until more warming took over as the polar caps shrank. So was this just a N. American effect?  It seems to have occurred in the Southern hemisphere too, but at not exactly the same time.  There’s about a thousand years of overlap.

            Then about 6000 years ago, the Sahara began to warm and dry up very slowly.  Shortgrass savanna, somewhat like the OK panhandle, turned into a desert like New Mexico.  It drove the hunters and gatherers off the Sahara and into the Nile river valley where they developed agriculture.  Cause of this warming is unknown.  Then another warming which was much more cataclysmic and faster occurred about 4200 years ago.  We think one or more dust bowl warming events happened.  It dryied the Nile so much that the river refused to flood.  But the people of the Nile, at this time weren’t irrigating, just using the annual floods to wet the land. So a 30-yr. Dust Bowl and no floods caused famines.  The sudden disappearance of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the similar fate of the Akkadian civilization in Asia Minor-Arabia, and several other places in the East all happened at this precise time.  The Sahara went from New Mexico vegetation to sand dunes as it is today.  Cause has been explained as change in ocean currents off Africa but this doesn’t explain Arabia.

            In more modern times, the era from 800 AD to 1300AD was a particularly warm one called the Medieval Warming. This time we have a measurement of the temperature difference.  It became about 5 degrees warmer than in Roman times. Wine grapes were grown in England.  It’s too cold to do that today.  Vikings traveled to Iceland and deforested the island, then Greenland and settled there during better conditions than exist today.  This warm era allowed better crop production and led Europe out of the Dark Ages.  Cause however is not well established.

            From 1309 to 1850 a disastrous era called the Little Ice Age took over.  We know the dates and cause fairly exactly because Chinese monks who studied the sun with lampblacked glass (part of their religion) suddenly recorded that sunspots almost disappeared in 1309.  The scarcity of sunspots continued until 1850.  Climate was about 7-10 degrees cooler and the cold has an obvious cause.  Sunspots are storms on the solar surface.  When they are plentiful it means that the sun is having more radiation output.  So solar radiation went down during the Little Ice Age.  Dickens wrote Christmas Carol with snow on the streets of London.  That is a truly rare occurrence nowadays. Was this climate change worldwide?  The jury is still out somewhat on this point.

            Another climate change was the Dust Bowl which affected N. America only.  From 1931-1938 midcontinent temperatures averaged 10 degrees warmer, and rainfall dropped by half, then returned to normal.  What cause?  Not well understood but one theory is a prolonged La Nina cycle.

            Bottom line of all these events is that climate changes quite a bit and it is natural.  Fred Flintstone didn’t pollute the atmosphere with too much gasoline in his rock car!  There wasn’t enough fossil fuels being burned in any of these eras to cause changes.