Guest Columnist: Recent climate data show world is cooling
Global warming\climate change hysteria continues to run wild. Our esteemed governor recently appointed the director of the lobby - Environment Colorado - and other environmentalist partisans to the regulatory board for oil and gas companies, a clear conflict of interest which will prove not to be in the interests of Coloradans. In Washington, recent legislation has, among many other ill-considered measures, outlawed incandescent lights and mandates a three-fold increase in production of ethanol from corn and other bio-mass sources.
The impacts of these misguided policies are beginning to become evident in higher food costs, restricted energy supplies which are leading to higher prices, and other adverse economic impacts. These legislative measures will do nothing to control the weather, but will do a lot to control you, eliminate your individual freedoms and reduce your employment opportunities. Even some studies by environmental groups have pointed out the net increase in CO2 from land clearing and conversion of food crops to raise fuel crops. Producing one gallon of ethanol will require a thousand liters of scarce water compared to only three or four liters to refine a gallon of gasoline.
At the national level, the proposed Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act, S2191) will impose steep costs on the U.S. economy, estimated even by its supporters at hundreds of billions of dollars in higher costs for energy that will ripple through the entire economy. This bill would establish a presidentially appointed "Carbon Market Efficiency Board" which would create an entirely new federal bureaucracy to set the price on carbon emissions. The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the impact of cap-and-trade energy price increases would disproportionately affect people at the lower end of the income scale. The EPA estimates that the bill may reduce GDP by $2.9 trillion by 2050 while reducing atmospheric CO2 by only around 25 ppm by 2095.
More and more scientists and meteorologists are speaking up. A recent conference in New York was attended by hundreds of scientists who adhere to scientific realism and valid processes. One of the best papers reviewing the natural impact on climate change is at www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC-Feb%2020.pdf.
Meanwhile, the earth continues to cool. Our world has entered what may be a long-term cooling trend in response to lower solar output. Climate on Earth and the other planets is driven by solar output and on Earth that's amplified by circulation patterns in the atmosphere and oceans. Attempts to refute the solar link have cited a handful of studies that have measured only the direct effects of a portion of the solar spectrum, not the total output of the sun. Indirect effects have not been included in these limited, partisan studies despite growing evidence of their validity. The Pacific and Atlantic multi-decade oscillation drives the El Niño and La Niña cycles which drive much of our weather patterns. This natural cycle has now shifted to the cool cycle which will further lower temperatures and drive higher snow accumulation and glacier growth in the northern hemisphere.
The summary of 2007 climate by the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies and National Climate Data Center used an average of the monthly data through the year to make the claim that 2007 was tied as the second warmest year on record. What they hid is that the warmth was the result of a temporary spike caused by a strong El Niño which drove up land and air temperatures. January was the warmest month of 2007 and the temperatures have declined sharply in a dramatic plunge with significantly colder winters and mild summers in both hemispheres. Every climate monitoring agency has reported declining atmospheric, surface and ocean temperatures, along with increased snow cover and ice volume.
Manmade climate change is a political fraud, a scientific scandal and a financial swindle. As we enter what may be a significant, multi-decade cooling period, we are going to need our crops for food and our plentiful domestic oil, natural gas, coal supplies and nuclear energy to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Pico is a retired naval flight officer with more than
three decades of experience in applying atmospheric and space weather forecasts to land, air, sea and space-based surveillance and communications systems operations.
