Wednesday, December 11, 2013

How Warm Is It?



Column for week of December 2, 2013

THOUGHTS, RAMBLINGS and OBSERVATIONS
by
Albert D. McCallum

How Warm Is It?

      The man made global warming enthusiasts live in difficult times. Real temperatures refuse to cooperate with the predictions made with computer models. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Computer models are, and always will be, useless for proving any theory.
     A computer models tells the programmer exactly what he tells it to tell. The basic rule is still “Garbage in, garbage out.” Program the computer to find that your birthday is on Christmas one year and the Fourth of July the next. That is the answer it will give you every time.
     Program the computer to predict temperatures based on increased carbon dioxide causing global warming. The computer will dutifully predict increased temperatures based on the size of the increase in carbon dioxide. Of course, the computer has no more control over real temperatures than it does over the date of your birthday.
     Some of the attempts to explain why temperatures aren't obeying the predictions are humorous. One claim is that the world is rapidly warming. The problem is that it is warming only in those places where there are no thermometers. Does this mean we can prevent global warming by putting thermometers everywhere?
     We are at the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle. To the surprise of some, sunspot activity is the lowest it has been at the peak of a cycle in one hundred years.
     This isn't a surprise to everyone. Five years or so ago I read a prediction that we were headed into a 30 years period of low sunspot activity. The scientist who made the prediction had studied hundreds of years of sunspot data. He had also discovered that world temperatures follow the sunspots. Lower sunspot activity is accompanied by lower temperatures. Based on this he also predicted that the 30 years of low sunspot activity would be cooler.
     None of this is enough to prove that sunspots control the temperature of the world. The odds are great that sunspots are more likely to influence temperatures than are computer models. The fact that the computer models have been consistently and substantially wrong gives more reasons to put your money on the sunspots.
     The so-called scientists who scream about global warming seem to be part of the same crowd that warned that we were experiencing soon to be disastrous global cooling during the 1970s. Having twice tripped on their own predictions, they now prefer to warn about climate change.
      It is all but certain they are riding a winner this time. The one thing certain about climate is that it has endlessly changed for so long as we have any records of climate. Cores from glaciers and from ocean sediments show thousands of years of change. What are the chances that the climate will suddenly stop changing?
      Past changes have gone back and forth, hot and cold, wet and dry. Today's climate change mongers want us to believe that the changes will all be endlessly for the worse. How would they scare anyone into providing endless grants for research by admitting that climate change might be a good thing? The even bigger scare game is to frighten people into accepting draconian government control of their lives in the name of saving us from the climate change bogeyman.
      I don't have space to cover the details of temperature change for the 150 years since temperatures began recovering from the Little Ice Age. Check the record and you will find three periods of warming, all followed by cooling. Also, there is no correlation between warming and increased carbon dioxide. Most of the warming occurred before there was a major increase in carbon dioxide.
      We should look to real climate scientists, not to politicians and talking heads with agendas, for the truth about climate. The people who have so far been nothing but wrong aren't good candidates to be our guides to the future. For information on climate, checkout climatedepot.com

aldmccallum@gmail.com

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Copyright 2013
Albert D. McCallum

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