Chapter 21.4: Al Gore gets a new job: Henny Penny, the sky is falling, send $100 to Al Gore to save our planet from destruction:
Shed not a tear for Al Gore. George Bush, Jr. would inherit the burdens of the Clinton Administration’s incompetency and suffer the September 11 attacks, while Gore found a new career gallivanting around the world in his private jet, predicting Armageddon and the end of the world in 10 years. Now Gore became the self-appointed High Priest of Environmental Causes, Al was out promoting his waste of cellulose. In January, 2006 – when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth – Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed and the years continued to pass and surprisingly we’re still here, and the climate activists have to now allege the “Apocalypse” has been merely postponed. Yet again BS, as Al Gore yet again continued to fill his coffers with donations from the scared masses. A new Ptolemy had been born!
To keep the ignorant masses scared and the “global warming” cash cow flowing, Gore introduced the Keeling Curve—a graph depicting seasonal and annual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations since 1958 from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii—to show how the burning of fossil fuels by industry and transportation, as well as other human activities, were changing the gaseous mix of the planet’s lower atmosphere. In the summer of 2006, atmospheric CO2 concentrations stood at 395 parts per million (ppm). Ten years later, after the supposed “Apocalypse” due date, they flirted with the 407-ppm mark, a snoozing .03% increase per year in an atmosphere that consists of less than 4% CO2, and water combined, where Nitrogen accounts for 78% of the atmosphere, oxygen 21% and argon 0.9%. Gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, methane, and ozone are trace gases that account for about a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere.
Therefore, much of his effort in the film needed a deceptive misdirection move, which necessitated drawing contrasts between conditions before and after the Industrial Revolution and illustrating how the rapid changes in atmospheric carbon in modern times were unlike anything that had taken place in several hundred thousand years. Forget about past false prognostications, the world was now coming to an end. “Armageddon” is finally here (almost). Don’t forget to send Al another $100 to save our planet before this all happens.
Chapter 21.5: Gee, Al, stop looking at your fat wallet and look at the facts, and the Sun, and the Ocean. You just might find Global Cooling is upon us and is the real danger, the real “inconvenient truth”:
Now all this “Henny Penny, the sky is falling” due to “Climate Change” was cute and scary, but the facts were not all there. We did not have weather buoys in the Southern Hemisphere to measure ocean temperature change until 1960. Methane Gas, many times more destructive than CO2, was constantly being emitted from fissures deep in the ocean and from retreating tundras uncovering rotting vegetation. And CO2 presents itself in many forms, many of which are good because they allow plants to create oxygen and at higher altitudes shelters us from the Sun’s intense heat.
I don’t want to go into the slow and fast carbon cycles, the protection CO2 gives the planet acting as a coolant in the thermosphere, or the Thermohaline Circulation of Ocean currents, or heat escaping from the center of the Earth due to radioactive decay, or the overwhelming effect of humidity on greenhouse temperatures and on the Global climate. It would take years, but we do not need go there, because the Sun is the prime generator of heat, and that is where we should look first.
So let us start with a little science primer, which Al Gore forgot to tell you, as he pocketed your donations. You probably picture the Earth’s annual journey around the Sun as being more or less a circle, but that’s only true some of the time. Models have long suggested that our home planet’s orbit shifts from circular to elliptic orbit and back again over hundreds of thousands of years, which plays a part in natural climate swings.
The orbit has an effect on climate by determining the amount of incoming Sunlight. The cycle of ice ages are linked to changes in the earth’s orbit, so they are important to the long-erm climate variability of the Earth. Earth’s orbit around the Sun is due to the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Sun.
The Earth goes through regular, large-scale cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, driven by a whole range of factors. Some of the main contributors are what are known as Milankovitch Cycles, along with variations in the Earth’s orbital path (cycling every 100,000 years), its axial tilt (on a 41,000-year cycle) and the “wobble” of its spin (on a 23,000-year cycle). These affect how much solar energy hits the Northern Hemisphere at different times of the year, and in turn affect the planet’s long-term climate.
The Earth‘s rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the solar system. When the orbit is more elongated, there is more variation in the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and in the amount of solar radiation, at different times in the year. In addition, the rotational tilt of the Earth (its obliquity) changes slightly. A greater tilt makes Earth’s seasons more extreme.
The semi-major axis is a constant. Therefore, when Earth’s orbit becomes more eccentric, the semi-minor axis shortens. This increases the magnitude of seasonal changes.
The relative increase in solar irradiation at closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) compared to the irradiation at the furthest distance (aphelion) is slightly larger than four times the eccentricity. For Earth’s current orbital eccentricity, incoming solar radiation varies by about 6.8%, while the distance from the Sun currently varies by only 3.4% (5.1 million km).
But the Sun and Earth are moving apart by about 15 cm per year – the culprit may be tides raised on the Sun by our home planet, according to Russian dynamists Gregory A. Krasinsky and Victor A. Brumberg. Something must really be pushing Earth outward from the Sun. But what?
One idea is that the Sun is losing enough mass, via fusion and the solar wind, to gradually be losing its gravitational grip on the Earth. And we only have 7.5 billion years left until the Sun swallows the Earth, unless the Earth continues to move away from the Sun as it is doing now.
But Takaho Miura of Hirosaki University in Japan and three colleagues think they also have the answer. In the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, theycalculate that, thanks to Earth, the Sun’s rotation rate is slowing by 3 milliseconds per century (0.00003 second per year). According to their explanation, the distance between the Earth and Sun is growing because the Sun is losing its angular momentum
The current trend of decreasing tilt between the Sun and the earth, by itself, will promote milder seasons (warmer winters and colder summers), as well as promote an overall cooling trend. Because most of the planet’s snow and ice lies at high latitude, decreasing tilt may encourage the onset of an ice age for two reasons: There is less overall summer insolation, and also less insolation at higher latitudes, which melts less of the previous winter’s snow and ice.
Chapter 21.6: Little Darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter, but here comes the Sun, here comes the Sun-Well Maybe Not:
The Sun is acting weird in this 24th cycle. It typically puts on a pageant of magnetic activity every 11 years for aurora watchers and Sun gazers alike, but this time it overslept. When it finally woke up (a year late), it gave the weakest performance in 100 years.
David Hathaway (NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center), and Giuliana de Toma (High Altitude Observatory) think the 11-year cycle might be part of a larger one. Historical records show weak cycles at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, so it could be that the solar cycle tapers every 100 years or so, in what’s known as the Gleissberg Cycle.
Matthew Penn (National Solar Observatory) offered another, more catastrophic option: the Sunspot cycle might die altogether. His team uses Sunspot spectra to measure their magnetic fields, and his data show a clear trend: the magnetic field strength in Sunspots is waning. Penn’s research showed that the Sunspot’s magnetic field is declining over time. Sunspots can only form if the magnetic field is greater than around 1,500 Gauss units, so if the trend continues, we could be headed for a time where no spots appear on the surface of the Sun, thus lowering the temperature on earth.
“If this trend continues, there will be almost no spots in Solar Cycle 25, and we might be going into another “Maunder Minimum,” Penn states. The first Maunder Minimum occurred during the second half of the 17th century. Almost no spots were seen on the Sun during this time, which coincided with Europe’s Little Ice Age.
Moreover, NASA’s forecast for the next solar cycle (25) reveals it will be the weakest of the last 200 years, at what is known as “Dalton Minimum” levels. The maximum of this next cycle — measured in terms of Sunspot numbers, a standard measure of solar activity level — could be 30% to 50% lower than the most recent one.
NASA is in effect forecasting a return to the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) but gives no mention of the brutal cold, crop loss, famine, and war associated with it:
1. Like the deeperMaunder and Spörer Minimum preceding it, the Dalton Minimum brought on a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2 degree C decline over 20 years, which devastated the country’s food production. Compare that to the 1 degree C increase from 1880 until now calculated by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and used by Al Gore to promote his Global Warming Cash Cow.
2. The Year Without a Summer also occurred during the Dalton Minimum, in 1816. It was caused by a combination of already low temperatures plus the after effects of the second largest volcanic eruption in 2,000 years: Mount Tambora’s VEI 7 in Indonesia on April 10, 1815.
3. The newspapers were preoccupied with the Battle of Waterloo between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, right up until the start of winter in 1815, when the weather turned decidedly whacky. And by 1816, the climate was dominating headline news as both Spring and then Summer failed to arrive.
One Virginia resident recalled, “In June, 1816, another snowfall came and folks went sleighing. On July 4, water froze in cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite.”
Clothes froze on the line in New England, ice on ponds and lakes was reported in northwestern Pennsylvania in both July and August, and Virginia had frosts in August. The temperature occasionally got into the 90s, but then would drop to nearly freezing in just a few hours. Crops that had managed to sprout were frozen out in early June, replanted, and frozen again in July. Very few crops were actually harvested, and of those that were, the yields were very poor. In turn, food and grain prices skyrocketed — for example, in 1815, oats sold for $0.12 a bushel but by the next year, a bushel would set you back $0.92.
And the story was the same across the world:
1. The potato crop in Ireland rotted in the ground resulting in widespread starvation.
2. In England, France and Germany, wheat crops failed leading to bread shortages and food riots and looting.
3. Northern China was also hard hit with thousands of people starving to death.
4. While in southern Asia, torrential rains triggered a cholera epidemic that killed many more.
The year 1816 went on to earn another, rather more morbid nickname, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”. One way or another, the COLD times are returning — it’s just a matter of when. An Inconvenient Truth? So, Al Gore, send your ill-gotten gains back to your frightened donors. Maybe I can replace you as the High Priest of Environmental Causes, for I predict the increase of 1degree C since 1880 will soon begin a quick trend towards minus 2 degree C as per the Dalton Minimum in 1816. Global Warming is a profitable hoax, but the inconvenient truth is that Global Cooling is upon us. Send your “Climate Change” donations to me now, for although I cannot promise to save our planet in the next 7.5 billion years, I can surely promise you I will buy a lot of fur coats and a private jet.