HYDROMETEOROLOGICAL DATA SHOW CLIMATE CHANGE DEPENDENT ON SOLAR VARIATION ONLY

An email to Benny Peiser from Will Alexander, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Email alexwjr@iafrica.com

"Coming from Africa, I have followed the Academies of Science/G8 issue with a great deal of concern. I fully understand and appreciate the anxiety of the 12 northern hemisphere academies, but I fear that their conclusions are altogether wrong. The fundamental mistake that both the pro- and anti-climate change theorists have made and continue to make, is their reliance on unprovable process theory, instead of applying observational theory to the huge volume (thousands of station years) of routinely recorded data, where the linkage between the hydrometeorological processes (rainfall, river flow, floods and droughts) and climatic perturbations is abundantly clear.

These are the principal results from my three-year study of what appears to be the largest and most comprehensive climate-related database studied anywhere. My search was for climate-related signals that occurred concurrently in most data sets of most processes. This is what I found.

* There has been a 9% increase in rainfall over South Africa as a whole since the commencement of district rainfall records in 1922.

* This increase consists of an increase in the frequency of beneficial widespread rainfall events, with an acceleration from the middle of the last century.

* Corresponding changes in river flow and floods, if present, were undetectable against the background of high natural variability.

* The natural variability is directly related to statistically significant (95% level) 21-year periodicity in all processes other than open water surface evaporation.

* This periodicity in turn is directly related to, and occurs concurrently with, the double sunspot cycle. The linkage is clearly apparent and unequivocal. It has been well documented and reported in South Africa for more than a century.

* The commencement of the periodicity in the hydrometeorological responses is characterised by sudden changes from drought conditions to high rainfall conditions and floods. These are directly (but not precisely) related to corresponding sudden changes in sunspot activity that are associated with the occurrence of the sunspot minima. (We have just entered such a period.)

* The two independent sunspot cycles have fundamentally different effects on the hydrometeorological processes. These alternating sequences of wet and dry years are well recorded in the early hydrological literature. This is probably why efforts to correlate the 11-year cycles, instead of the double cycles, with climatic responses have been unsuccessful.

* There is some evidence of a linkage between increases in sunspot activity during the past century with corresponding increases in the South African surface air temperature and the frequency of widespread rainfall events.

* There is no linkage between climate and the occurrence of malaria in Africa.

In summary, if the consequences of human activity on the scale identified in the joint statement of the academies of science are so large, they should be readily identifiable in the large volume of data that I studied. Despite a diligent search and without any preconceived ideas or intentions, I was unable to find any evidence of the adverse effects of climate change that could not be explained by natural variability, including the effects of solar activity. Such changes that I was able to identify were all beneficial to both humanity and the natural environment.

If any of your readers have an interest, I can provide references and more information.




UN ATLAS, ZOOMED IN ON ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE, MISSES BIG PICTURE

"When I fly, I always insist on taking the window seat. Maybe it's the 12-year-old boy in me - I like seeing the world as Matchbox cars and ants-as-people scurrying about. Even as an adult and a resident of a large metropolis, I'm always curious about exactly what this modern expanse of planned communities and shopping meccas really looks like from above. I recently took a flight from New Orleans, across the center of the country, into Chicago. Upon the flight's descent, about 50 miles outside of Chicago, I had a revelation; or, more apt, a bit of confusion: I'd flown 800-plus miles, most of it unobstructed by clouds, and all along I was asking myself - where exactly is this supposedly overwhelming urban sprawl? Certainly there were splotches of it here and there. Certainly there were rare specks of civilization within a virtual universe of green and brown. But sprawl? I just didn't see it.

All of this was little more than an interesting observation until the next day, when I read about the release of the United Nations atlas entitled "One Planet Many People" - comparing decades-old satellite photos of certain areas with modern ones, supposedly showing the global devastation of man. Interesting. I assumed the UN project had more resources for statistical analysis than I did during my few cross-country trips. But when I dug into the book, what I found wasn't actually a shocking exposé on how mankind is destroying the planet. Instead, I found an excellent exposé of the flaws of the fundamental environmentalist argument.

While environmentalist causes are often born anecdotally, they're certainly not always lacking in statistics - and the pages of this UN atlas have just enough, as they say, to be dangerous. The facts and figures sprinkled throughout this UN atlas are not necessarily invalid, but they always seem to be missing one concept - the context of the global calculus. X number of acres of rain forest have been cut down. OK, but X acres of how many total? Cities have grown X amount per year, on average. I believe you, but how much of our space is left? Carbon dioxide emissions for the decade were X tons. Great, that seems like a lot, but what specific events will happen because of this? Unfortunately, these questions often elicit a lot of "I don't knows", "maybes", and "possiblys".

Unless you're one who believes the end result must be dire merely because of a statistic in print, the numbers presented by traditional environmentalist arguments are rarely meaningful. Fine, so people don't like math - math is boring, I get it. People do like pretty pictures - hence, the UN is releasing an atlas rather than volumes of statistical analysis to prove its point. Now, I love nifty satellite photos as much as the next guy, but any search for true significance in them will yield far less than the proverbial thousand words. Looking at photo after photo comparing specific areas over decades, you can't deny that humans have had some effect on the planet. But how much? The majority of photos are close-ups of specific cities, so all that's evident is that coastlines are colored differently, a few trees are now buildings, and cities are growing.

After millenniums of seemingly massive population growth, humans take up only a minuscule amount of the planet. Even given our current growth rate, the human effect will still remain basically infinitesimal. Environmentalists would have you believe that we're inhabiting the lone, rare pockets of land that can sustain human life, and any damage to those are, indeed, globally devastating. However, when one zooms out, so to speak, from the areas we inhabit now what we see is ample land, ripe for our inevitable technological advancements to make inhabitable.

The collection of photographs in this book - and most photographic environmental evidence, in reality - proves only one thing: Our effects on the planet are really evident only when zoomed in on. Beyond the admittedly neat pictures, this attempt at an atlas of man's destruction crystallizes but one thing: Environmentalists love microcosms. Any situation they can prove to be gravely perilous in a 40-square-mile area, they tend to extrapolate globally. It's been the linchpin of the environmental movement forever: coal smoke in a few large cities during the early 1900s, a few miles of coastline destroyed by an oil tanker crash, the mere existence of pollutants in relatively tiny metropolitan areas - all these were heralded as environmental disasters.

Despite constant warnings, global devastation never quite seems to happen. We've been safe thus far - throughout industrial revolutions, oil landgrabs, and periods of rampant consumption - and there has yet to be any solid, fact-based rationale to explain how we won't always find a way to grow beyond microcosmic environmental problems. It appears environmentalists can't see the forest because they're zoomed in on one or two ailing trees.

Excerpt from The Christian Science Monitor, 23 June 2005





GLOBAL CONFUSION -- BOTH HOTTER AND COOLER COMING!

Global warming could trigger an Ice Age in the northern hemisphere as seen in a recent Hollywood disaster movie, a groundbreaking study suggested today. British scientists have analysed climate patterns at the end of the last Ice Age and believe that as the southern regions of the world heat up, northern parts could grow colder.

The findings by experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Stirling and Durham contradict the widely-held view that global warming will impact across the world. Their findings are more like something out of blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming causes the Gulf Stream to be switched off.

The 11,400 years of climatic stability since the last Ice Age have resulted in a warm Europe and cold southern ocean because the Gulf Stream takes warm water north across the equator. But the study found global warming could prompt major cooling of the north Atlantic as ice caps melt, cooling the north Atlantic and transforming wind patterns around a warming Antarctica. The researchers say a bipolar climatic "seesaw" effect - last triggered when the Earth heated up after the Ice Age - could happen again.

The team spent 14 years analysing radiocarbon and isotope samples from Patagonia in South America - the most southerly land mass outside of Antarctica - where they built up a picture of glacier changes in the past 25,000 years. After comparing their results with data on north Atlantic glaciers over the same time period, they found that during periods of major climate change the Patagonian ice rivers expanded while those in the north shrank, and vice versa. The data shows the seesaw effect last happened during the transition from the last Ice Age, 17,500 years ago, to our present climate, 11,400 years ago.

With the Earth now appearing to move out of a settled climate period, the experts believe the time could be ripe for the seesaw effect to happen again. Project leader Professor David Sugden, of Edinburgh University's School of GeoSciences, said: "Our discoveries raise interesting questions for our present warming world. How stable is our present climate system? "How far can it be pushed before we inadvertently switch the bipolar seesaw on or off? Can it be switched on by changes in the southern hemisphere, for example by changes in Antarctica?

"The study confirms that we may be closer to Ice Age conditions in the northern hemisphere than many previously thought." Their research has been published in the Swedish journal Geografiska Annaler.

From The Scotsman, 23 June 2005





ANY CLIMATE CHANGE TO BE VERY SLOW

The controversial idea that global warming could trigger a sudden drop in temperatures - maybe not in a matter of days as portrayed in the recent disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, but possibly within a century - has finally been put to rest. The latest ice core drilled from northern Greenland is showing that the last interglacial period, despite being warmer than today, did not end in a sudden freeze. Rather, it took thousands of years for the warm temperatures to give way to the next ice age.

The Greenland ice sheet is made from layers of snow that have compacted into ice over millennia. By drilling a core of ice, researchers can look back in time and determine the temperature when the snow fell by analysing the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the ice. Two previous Greenland ice cores, one known as GRIP extracted by European scientists in 1992, and another called GISP2 retrieved by Americans a year later, gave climatologists their best ever records of temperatures going far back in time. The two cores agreed almost perfectly all the way back to 113,000 years ago, but then diverged dramatically.

GRIP showed that temperatures in Greenland, and presumably worldwide, underwent many sudden fluctuations between 113,000 to 125,000 years ago. In one instance, temperatures appeared to plummet by up to 14 °C within 70 years. This sparked alarm because the last interglacial period, known as the Eemian, lasted from about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, and conditions then are thought to closely parallel today's climate. Scientists worried that warm temperatures during the Eemian could have shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps the north-eastern US and northern Europe relatively warm for their latitudes.

But controversy erupted when GISP2 found no record of such fluctuations. It soon became clear that at least one team, and possibly both, had drilled in a region where the underlying rock is very hilly, potentially jumbling the bottom 10 per cent of the ice. To resolve the debate, European researchers went back to northern Greenland in 1996 and started drilling in a region with flat bedrock, which they reached in July 2003. The new core, known as NGRIP, goes back 123,000 years, and at ~3085 metres it is the longest ice core recovered from Greenland. Besides analysing the oxygen isotopes in the ice, the Europeans also looked at levels of methane trapped in air bubbles. Methane levels rise during warm periods and fall when it gets cold, and the variations back up the oxygen-isotope data.

"This time we are 100 per cent certain that the ice core is reliable:' says team member Jurgen Peder Steffensen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "The new analysis also shows that the two older ice cores are only reliable to 105.000 years." The NGRIP core reaches into the final 8000 years of the Eemian. The team found that Greenland was then about five degrees warmer on average than today, [All those prehistoric SUVs at work, no doubt] and that the climate was stable. The warm period ended with a slow cooling over 5000 years"

Excerpt from New Scientist, 11 September 2004

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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