From Ex-PH2;
I went through everything I could find on weather. Per the climate peeps, the planet is the hottest thing ever recorded. Color-coded maps make it look like the place is burning to a crisp when it isn’t. Using the word ‘hot’ implies that the actual air temperature is radically increased, which is not true. It’s an average temperature overall, covering the entire planet, and an average half degree or one degree of increase is disingenuously labeled ‘hot’, as if the planet were sitting in a frying pan on my stove with the gas burner going full tilt.
Do not misunderstand me. We absolutely do need research into the subject of climate in order to have better, more accurate weather forecasts. Since Doppler radar was introduced after the 1974 Midwest tornado swarm and has become a common tracking method, a lot of lives have been saved. Ongoing research has provided valuable and vital information about how extreme storms form and where they are going and how much damage they may do, and has provided better, more accurate forecasts of rain and snow volume.
But it’s weather, people. It’s not climate. Weather is 135 years of record-keeping, a very short length of time when you consider that interglacial periods run anywhere from 30,000 years to 60,000 years in length. We’re in the last 25% of the Quaternary Period, which runs back about 2.5+/- million years. I don’t think any of us are going to live long enough to see the actual end of this current interglacial period, unless – and I use that word advisedly – unless somehow, with our usual silliness as an arrogant, self-important, definitely not omnipotent, control-freak species, we make such a mess of things that we slam ourselves right back into a glacial maximum.
For anyone who says that can’t happen, well – I have a chart to show you. My editor Tecumseh thought I should use something more logarithimic, which I’ve done further on in this article. But that does not show the same differences in time that this Excel chart shows. It should scare the living crap out of you, because the prolonged cold is always preceded by a spasm of warmth and the warm period is not the same length of time as the prolonged cold that follows it. You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the chart. It covers the last 600,000 years.
Blue is cold. Yellow is not cold. We are in the far lefthand yellow column. No temperatures were used, just the actual length of time each period lasts. That is what counts. They show an oscillating wave form. The tallest blue column has a time span of 170,000 years. Note that the yellow columns differ considerably from the blue. The shortest interglacial period in that chart is the Aftonian, 30,000 years long, following the 170,000 years of the Wisconsin glacial maximum. We are almost two-thirds of the way through the Aftonian time span now. Granted, it’s a rough chart, but when someone says “it’s an average of 100,000 years for each climate cycle”, that is pure baloney. Averaging throws off the real numbers completely, which changes the results of research. This page provides real time and temperatures, not averages. It does not name the different glacials and interglacial periods, as I did. I dealt ONLY with time length.
However, there are people who just do not care about using real numbers, for a good reason: follow the money.
In the pursuit of finding things out, I recently reported the attempt by a salaried and grant-paid researcher and professor, Jagadish Shukla at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, to have ‘climate deniers’ investigated under the RICO Act. He conned 19 other climate peeps, including 4 who worked with him, into signing it, because ‘climate deniers’ are exactly like the people who were genetically modifying tobacco for J.R. Reynolds to make it more addictive. I think any reasoning person will agree that a GMO organism is somewhat different from a planetary atmosphere. Likewise, a bunch of people who have a different opinion from another bunch of people about something is not quite the same thing as a whistleblower’s report. I was appalled, and rightly so, by that demand letter sent to the US Attorney General. In fact, it garnered so much adverse public notice that it was withdrawn, and Shukla is being investigated. Now I find that he was also claiming a Nobel Prize he never received.
There is much more of that kind of behavior going on. It isn’t hard to find. If you haven’t heard of Michael E. Mann before, he is the head of Penn State’s climate science department. Yes, that Penn State. He claimed in his CV that he’d won a Nobel prize. He was forced to recant that claim when his bit of Stolen Valor was revealed to be a complete lie on his part. In fact, the Nobel Committee said he’d never received or even been nominated for such an award.
But would Penn State dump him? No. He brings in millions of dollars of grant money every year for the university’s research programs. His hockey stick chart, which shows falsified temperature records over 1,000 years, made him famous. People grabbed onto it like ticks hunting blood. He refused to admit that he had done that deliberately to get grant money. He sued someone for taking him to task over fudging the data he used.
The point is that averaging, or altering the data as Mann did with his 1,000-year hockey stick chart, makes it incorrect. It blocks access to the actual results. Tecumseh provided me with this logarithmic chart for something more accurate. Note that that current warm period (furthest right span) is basically a flat line of real temperatures over a specified time period.
Mann really does not like criticism and he’s getting a lot of it now, mostly for his arrogant attitude. Most recently, he went running to the Pope for confirmation that his was the only correct position, and that all the mean, mean, mean old meanies who won’t let him have his way are just picking on him. And of course, the Pope patted his little shoulder and said, ‘Well, of course, you’re right, they’re terribly mean,’ or words to that effect.
Now, why does this matter? Well, let’s ask Galileo Galilei. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s that crusty fellow who supported Copernicus’s heliocentric Universe theory, in which the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, and the Universe revolves around it as well. He was obstinately in support of it. He even tried to prove it by publishing dialogues about it. And then he got himself one of them there newfangled telescope things and looked through it. And guess what he saw? He saw that Venus had phases, just like the Moon. Therefore, Venus must be orbiting the Sun. He saw mountains on the Moon. It wasn’t a flat pancake in the sky, after all. He turned his telescope on Jupiter and saw Jupiter’s system of moons. He may have also seen Saturn and its ring system. Some of his drawings suggest that. He used a camera obscura to bring the Sun into his observatory and found that the sun had sunspots, confirming what had long been recorded elsewhere by the Chinese. And he drew those sunspots.
Unfortunately, the governing body of all of Europe was the Church of Rome. And that Government did not want its stewpot stirred. It would cause chaos! Some philosophers refused completely to even look through a telescope. The first person Galileo discussed his ideas with was Cardinal Bellarmine, who officially didn’t like it at the behest of Pope Paul V, but tolerated it. Galileo faced one Inquisition because of his stubbornness. Later, Pope Urban VIII was amenable to these new-fangled ideas, but at some point changed his mind and said ‘No, no, no!’, because he was feeling a great deal of political pressure and wanted to keep his job.
When Galileo published his ‘Dialogue’, the Pope had him arrested and subjected to a second official Inquisition. It wasn’t that they didn’t know that the Earth orbited the Sun. The Church’s official doctrine said the Sun circled around the Earth and that was that. No arguments or discussions about it were tolerated.
Galileo’s refusal to knuckle under resulted in permanent house arrest for him. He stayed in his home until he died in 1642. In the 1990s, the Church finally said ‘We were wrong. Galileo was right.’ No, he was never excommunicated, just imprisoned in his own house for having a politically incorrect opinion and being unwilling to recant under political pressure. At some point, he did publicly recant, but not privately.
Does this sound familiar? Where and how many times have we seen this kind of thing before?
Now Bill Nye, the so-called Science Guy, has said he is quite open to filing criminal charges against people who disagree with the more popular meme of global warming or climate change, or whatever it’s called this year. Filing a criminal complaint against someone for having a different opinion than yours about something is about as Medieval as you can get, especially when that something seems to be not much more than a scam run by money-grubbing, power-hungry control freaks whose methods are questionable.
Science does not advance or create or innovate when this kind of restriction occurs. Another name for it is Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was Stalin’s director of the Soviet Union’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the fellow who tossed agricultural science and Mendelian genetics out the window in favor of his own personal ideology of how plants change and how to manage agriculture. His idiotic methods cause mass starvation in the USSR. Ideology does not fill the breadbasket, but it does destroy progress. When ideology is never questioned, or dissenters are punished for doing so, it is nothing more than going Medieval and/or subscribing to Lysenkoism, with no consideration for the consequences of doing so.
In my view, what we see is the Earth taking care of itself. It’s business as usual and we’re just along for the ride. We should definitely keep the place clean, because we live here and unless another habitable world is found, we’re stuck here. We have nowhere else to go. Whether or not the climate is changing one direction or the other, I have no opinion on it at all. But turning a branch of science into an ideology and making dissent a crime, as with Lysenkoism, leaves the path of reason.
My concern is that not only are these researchers lying about their curriculum vitae with Stolen Valor claims of awards they didn’t earn, but also that they are fudging and/or forging their data into the bargain for the sole purpose of getting money. I do not believe they can be trusted any more.
I repeat that we absolutely do need the research. It is vital to have better, more accurate weather forecasting. It is incredibly important, however, to these other people, who have cash and status at stake, to be on top of the heap and make climate change the only acceptable thing to consider. “They” have turned it into an ideology. “They” have as wide a horde of believers as any fundamentalist preacher could ever ask for. “They” say that the climate is out of control. That alone is doubtful. Paleontological and geological records show otherwise. Those records show that the European Alps were bare of snow cover 7,000 years ago.
So I’m going ask the following question because I think it’s both reasonable and important.
What are we supposed to do if their predictions turn out to be wrong?
