President Obama just made a melodramatic appeal at the United Nations for global measures to dramatically curb what he called “the climate threat,” current euphemism for what is more popularly known as Global Warming, the theory that man-made CO2 emissions from cars, coal plants and other man-made sources are causing the earth to warm to the point the polar icecaps are irreversibly melting and threatening to flood a quarter or more of the earth’s surface. There’s only one thing wrong with Mr. Obama’s dramatic scenario: it is scientifically utterly wrong. Since 2007 the polar icecaps have been growing not melting and the earth has been cooling, not warming.
If the fear of death from a fictitious Swine Flu were not enough, the scare stories on world media such as BBC or CNN, showing melting icebergs are dramatic enough to cause one sleepless nights. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon even made a recent appeal while standing on an Arctic ice-flow, claiming that man-made CO2 emissions were causing “100 billion tons” of polar ice to melt each year, so that in 30 years the Arctic would be “ice-free”. One organization, the WWF, claimed that the Arctic ice was melting so fast that in eighty years sea-levels would rise by 1.2 meters, creating “floods affecting a quarter of the world.” Wow! That’s scary. Goodbye Hamburg, New York, Amsterdam…
The publicity stunt of Ban Ki-Moon was carefully orchestrated. It was not said that his ship could only come within 700 miles of the North Pole owing to frozen ice. Nor that he made his stunt in the summer when Arctic ice always melts before refreezing beginning September.
The reality about Arctic ice is quite different. Although some 10 million square kilometres of sea-ice melts each summer, each September the Arctic starts to freeze again. The extent of the ice now is 500,000 sq km greater than it was this same time last year – which was, in turn, 500,000 sq km more than in September 2007, the lowest point recently recorded (see Cryosphere Today of the University of Illinois, http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ ).
By next April, after months of darkness, it will be back up to 14 million sq km or likely more. As British science writer Christopher Booker remarks, “even if all that sea-ice were to melt, this would no more raise sea-levels than a cube of ice melting in a gin and tonic increases the volume of liquid in the glass.”
Sunbeams from cucumbers?
The current global warming propaganda scare is being hyped by politicians and special interests such as Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street financial firms that stand to reap billions trading new carbon credit financial futures. They are making an all-out effort to scare the world into a deal at the December Copenhagen Global Warming summit, the successor to the Kyoto agreement on CO2 emission reduction. It’s been estimated that the Global Warming bill supported by Barack Obama and his Wall Street patrons, passed by the House of Representatives but not by the more conservative US Senate, would cost US taxpayers some $10 trillion.
In the UK, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown is fully on the global warming bandwagon, the BBC, the Royal Society are proposing wild schemes for “climate engineering,” including putting up mirrors in space to keep out the sun’s rays, or lining the highways with artificial trees to suck CO2 out of the air, to be taken away and buried in holes in the ground. Perhaps it would provide make-work for a few thousand Britons unemployed by the ravages of the recent financial collapse, but it would do nothing else than waste taxpayer money already stretched to the limits in bank bailouts. The entire farce has been compared to satirist Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver who meets a fictional character trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
A major new study published in the respected Journal of Geophysical Research of the American Geophysical Union, Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, by scientists Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature
J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas of the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland in New Zealand and R.M. Carter
(http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml), confirms that over the past fifty years, since 1950, fully 81% of tropical climate change can be linked to the Pacific weather phenomenon known as El Nino. And the remaining 19% they linked to increased solar radiation. No man made emissions played a role.
El Ninos, termed by scientists El Nino Southern Oscillations or ENSOs, are believed by climatologists and astrophysicists to be related to eruptions in solar activity which occur periodically.
Dr. Theodor Landscheidt of Canada’s Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, says ENSO is the “strongest source of natural variability in the global climate system. During the severe ENSO event 1982/1983, when the sea surface off Peru warmed by more than 7° C, it was discovered that there are strong links to weather in other regions as, for instance, floods in California and intensified drought in Africa.”
Landscheidt adds, “El Niño and La Niña are subjected to external forcing by the sun’s varying activity to such a degree that it explains nearly all of ENSO’s irregularities and makes long-range forecasts beyond the 1-year limit possible. This is no mere theory. My forecasts of the last two El Niños turned out correct and that of the last one was made more than two years ahead of the event…” (Solar Activity Controls El Niño and La Niña, in http://www.john-daly.com/sun-enso/sun-enso.htm.). Even James Hansen, one of the outspoken protagonists of the Global Warming idea admits, “The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change…The natural forcing due to solar irradiance changes may play a larger role in long-term climate change than inferred from comparisons with general circulation models alone.”
El Ninos are linked to floods, droughts and other weather disturbances in many regions of the world. In the Atlantic Ocean, effects lag behind those in the Pacific by 12 to 18 months. They tend to occur every three to eight years. La Ninas are the associated cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean cycles.
According to the US National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration, in North America, El Niño creates warmer-than-average winters in the upper Midwest states and the Northeast. California and the southwestern US become significantly wetter, while the northern Gulf of Mexico states and northeast Mexico are wetter and cooler than average during the El Niño phase of the oscillation. In Asia and parts of Australia El Nino causes drier conditions, increasing bush fires.
This sounds remarkably like what the Global Warming scare chorus claims is the result of manmade CI2 emissions or as they now slyly term it, “climate change.”
Warmer 1000 years ago?
In Sweden a new study (, in published by Haakan Grudd of the University of Stockholm’s Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology confirms that the Arctic today is not warmer than in previous historical periods centuries ago before coal power plants or automobiles. Grudd’s study concludes that “The late-twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the new record: On decadal-to-centennial timescales, periods around a.d. 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were equally warm, or warmer. The 200-year long warm period centered on a.d. 1000 was significantly warmer than the late-twentieth century and is supported by other local and regional paleoclimate data.” (H. Grudd, Torneträsk tree-ring width and density ad 500–2004: a test of climatic sensitivity and a new 1500-year reconstruction of north Fennoscandian summers, Climate Dynamics, Volume 31, Numbers 7-8 / December, 2008, in
http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j71453650116753/?p=fcd6adbe04ff4cc29b7131b5184282eb&pi=0.) Put simply, the earth was warmer one thousand years ago than today. And there were no records of SUVs or coal plants belching CO2 into the atmosphere back then.
The only problem with these serious scientific studies is that mainstream media entirely ignores them, preferring dramatic scare story scenarios such as Barack Obama presented in his UN speech or the UN’s Ban Ki-Moon in his staged Arctic ice drama.
Strangely enough, none of the Global Warming proponents that I am aware of have tried to correlate ENSO activity with global temperature changes. Should we instead be proposing to outlaw El Ninos or forbid solar eruptions? It makes as much scientific sense as banning or capping CO2 emissions. Global Warming as a new religion is one thing, but we should be clear that the high priests are the same Gods of Money who brought us Peak Oil religion a few years ago and the current trillion dollar financial meltdown known as asset securitization. The reality is that Global Warming like Peak Oil and other scares are but another attempt by powerful vested interests to convince the world to sacrifice that they remain in control of the events of this planet. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to misuse climate to argue for a new Malthusian reduction of living standards for the majority of the world while a tiny elite gains more power.
F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
