The conceit of the climate cultists is that industrial man has altered – and is continuing to alter – the climate within a few hundred years so much that sea levels are rising, ice sheets are melting, and that we can – and must – alter it back within a decade, or so, or we’re all gonna die.
The sheer audacity that humans can effect this level of change amazes. One day these same people tell us we are “insignificant” from the perspective of the universe. The next day they say we are destroying the planet via gas stoves and cow farts. “Fantastical” is a word not much used nowadays; it fits perfectly here.
The facts are that climate fluctuates over time for a variety of reasons, some of which are unknown. We don't know, for instance to what extent that huge, glowing ball of hydrogen and helium floating out in space -- the sun -- effects the long-term warming or cooling of the earth's various climate zones. Perhaps its influence is negligible. Or perhaps it is decisive, and the “Anthropogenic Climate Change” narrative on which we are spending trillions of dollars is nothing but a money grab by the elites from the middle class enacted for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.
Continuing on that one aspect of warming, heat from the sun, or Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), surely has an impact on our temperature. How could it not? But is it being measured properly and accurately?
For all five Northern Hemisphere temperature series, different TSI estimates suggest everything from no role for the Sun in recent decades (implying that recent global warming is mostly human-caused) to most of the recent global warming being due to changes in solar activity (that is, that recent global warming is mostly natural). It appears that previous studies (including the most recent IPCC reports) which had prematurely concluded the former, had done so because they failed to adequately consider all the relevant estimates of TSI and/or to satisfactorily address the uncertainties still associated with Northern Hemisphere temperature trend estimates.
Has the earth ever experienced rapid, drastic climate change of the kind we are told by our betters that we are causing with our gas stoves and gasoline cars? Yes, many times in the past. Have they been caused by man since the late-19th century? No. Recall that Karl Marx's Communism was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution; the neo-Marxists are still assailing it. Will their solution work any better than it did nearly 200 years ago? No.
Let’s look at a place where the earth really is “boiling:” The Sahara Desert. The Sahara, it seems, not only has switched from lush to sand before, and quickly, it does so on a 20,000-year cycle congruent with the wobble of the earth in its orbit. If other parts of the planet warm or cool, it seems likely to be in large part the result of geology, orbits, or sun irradiance. See above: “failed to adequately consider.”
The wobble of the earth alters the angle of the radiance absorbed from the sun. What else alters the sun’s output? Sunspots. Might we be about to get very cold? That is, says NASA, a possibility:
Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters… Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots.
When the next Maunder Minimum occurs, will we be told, too, that it is our fault the ice caps are growing and the sea level concurrently shrinking? Bet on it. And it will have nothing to do with carbon, methane, or CO2. It doesn’t now.
Article tags: carbon emissions, climate alarmism, climate change, Environment, environmentalism, global warming, net-zero
In addition, the alarmists attribute “global warming” to an amplification of the sun/earth energy balance via sunlight interaction with an artificial accumulation of anthropogenic carbon dioxide—the greenhouse effect. But here’s what everyone has overlooked from the very beginning: the greenhouse effect captures heat, not temperature. These two concepts are NOT the same. In physics, heat is a form of energy and is conserved but temperature is only a manifestation of heat content in a given substance under a given physical state and it is most definitely NOT conserved. This is especially true with gases (review, for example, the difference between adiabatic and non-adiabatic processes). The variable that links these two phenomena is of course heat capacity. Thus, the entire effort to measure the greenhouse gas effect from human activities through global temperature records is completely misdirected even if such an effort could be achieved with accuracy and precision. Only the heat content is determinative; temperature means nothing without a careful consideration of heat capacity. Moreover, the complexity and variability of the earth’s atmosphere ( e.g. changing humidity and changing pressures) multiplies the uncertainty of measuring heat content to a level that is orders of magnitude greater than even global temperature measurements. But this is all just religion anyway, so who’s counting?