Basic physics supports solar activity as cause of global warming

Comments from a successful long-range weather forecaster:

Science, not argument about conspiracy, must be central to the debate about climate change (Letters, November 13), nevertheless Al Gore's stake in green business (Generation Investment Management) and David Miliband's closeness to the nuclear industry merit attention. Dr Wolff's claim that the climate-sceptical position "is in contradiction to everything we expect from basic physics" is bizarre, since physics is the basis of Weather Action's world-leading solar weather technique of long-range forecasting. The SWT relies on predictable effects of solar particles, not on CO2 or meteorology models - and I can assure your correspondent Richard Nunn that the SWT will be published when matters of intellectual property are sorted out

Dr Wolff admits "CO2 has indeed increased in response to temperature change in the past ..." This is a general pattern in slow changes over the last 250,000 years (Caillon et al, Science, March 2003). Furthermore proxy measurements covering thousands of years (eg Neff et al, Nature 2001) show that, in timescales of 22 years, the magnetic sun-spot cycle and world temperatures move together, whereas CO2, while following temperature in slow general terms, also moves the other way for quite long periods. This contradicts the theory that CO2 drives temperature and climate.

Current CO2 levels, or rate of CO2 rise, are not unprecedented. CO2 levels have been three times current levels (Bob Carter, Marine Geophysical Lab, Queensland). CO2 rapid rise "spikes" doubtless happened before, given the power of nature compared with man's puny activity (not even 1% of total greenhouse effect), but ice-core data smoothes them out.

The global warmers' claim that current extra CO2 causes warming which gets dangerously magnified through the greenhouse effect of extra water vapour in the atmosphere, consequent to the temperature rise, also fails. The sea absorbs extra CO2. Furthermore, increased transpiration-cooling by enhanced growth of plants, which is caused by extra CO2, cancels out the extra greenhouse warming of that same CO2. Increased greenhouse heating due to doubling CO2 is 3.7 watts per sq metre. This is negated by about the same amount of enhanced transpiration-cooling of plants, all of which grow faster in extra CO2. Therefore there is no CO2 driven net heat flow and surface temperature rise. Temperature and climate change in our epoch is therefore driven by other factors, especially solar particle and magnetic effects.

So can action against climate change make a difference? Even if temperature trends can be changed - and controlling the sun is a tall order even for a Bush/ Blair legacy - there is no evidence of connected change in weather extremes or useful outcomes. Let's save the planet from real chemical pollutants, but CO2 is not one of them. Wouldn't it be better to work to predict climate than make vain attempts to change it?

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THE STALAGMITE STORY

Do stalagmites grow from the ceiling or the floor of cave? Time is up -- they grow from the floor of caves (stalactites grow from the ceiling), but the key is that they grow over long periods of time. Some stalagmites are thousands of years old and if they are in just the right type of cave, they can preserve a signal of temperature and precipitation levels over the time they grew.

A team of scientist from Austria and Germany located three stalagmites in the Spannagel Cave located around 2,500 m above sea level at the end of the Tux Valley in Tyrol (Austria) close to the Hintertux glacier. The temperature of the cave stays near freezing and the relative humidity in the cave is always at or near 100%. The stalagmites grew at a rate between 17 and 75 millionths of a meter per year and are nearly 10,000 years old.

The trick to extracting a temperature signal from the stalagmites involves measuring the oxygen 18 isotope (d18O) levels of each small layer from a sample taken from the features in the Spannagel Cave. Given the near perfect conditions in the cave, the d18O levels are determined by the temperature of the drip water at the time the layer was formed. Vollweiler et al. report that the resulting record "may thus be interpreted as a temperature signal with low d18O values corresponding to warmer temperatures and high d18O values corresponding to colder temperatures."

The results are seen in Figure 1 (below) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) and Medieval Warm Period (MWP) stand out prominently along with other major climate features of the Holocene. The authors note that the record "exhibits substantial oscillations with low d18O values between 7.5 and 5.9 kyr (Holocene Climatic Optimum), 3.8 and 3.6, and 1.2 and 0.7 kyr (MWP) and high d18O between 7.9 and 7.5, 5.9 and 5, 3.5 and 3 kyr, and 600 and 150 yr (LIA)." In discussing warm periods of the past, they note "Between 2.25 and 1.7 kyr, a time known as the Roman Warm Period (RWP), some of the Alpine passes were ice-free also in winter." Further, they note that the record "has a pronounced peak at 2.2 kyr, synchronous with Hannibal's crossing of the Alps in 218 BC." The stalagmite is screaming to us that many periods in the past 9,000 years were warmer than present-day conditions!

The team of scientists notes that variations in vegetation, glacier extension, timberline, tree-ring width, and lake and river histories indicate major climate oscillations during the past few thousand years. Figure 2 shows a comparison of the d18O record with European glacial extension and lake level data. All three records clearly show (a) the Little Ice Age, (b) the Medieval Warm Period, and (c) periods in the past that are warmer than today.

So are the stalagmites telling us a story that only applies for conditions around the cave or for conditions that affected much of the planet? Two articles have appeared recently in major journals with results that reinforce the stalagmite story, but from very distant parts of the world. Achim Brauning of the University of Stuttgart headed off to southern Tibet to core trees to study climate variations preserved in the ring widths and composition. Brauning notes that other tree ring series from Tibet "have shown that the period from 1150 to 1380 was characterized by higher temperatures than today" and that "The succeeding period from 1430 until the late nineteenth century witnessed a series of cold intervals indicated by growth reductions and changes in the isotopic composition in juniper trees." Brauning concludes that "Larch trees from a third glacier forefield in southeastern Tibet show evidence of glacier activity from 1580 to 1590, from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century and from 1860 to 1880." The Little Ice Age seems to come through loud and clear in the trees of southern Tibet.

Finally, a pair of scientists from the United States and Canada cored a lake in southeastern British Columbia and examined variations in pollen spores through layers of the core. Hallett and Hills found that between 700 and 150 years ago, the Kootenay Valley had returned to a wet closed forest "that appears to be a response to Little Ice Age cooling."

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rolled out the Hockey Stick that showed little variation in climate until the great warm-up of the last 100 years. But as we see in a cave in Austria, trees in Tibet, and pollen in a lake in British Columbia, there is overwhelming evidence of considerable climate variability over the past 1,000 to 10,000 years.

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ATOMIC WARMING A LOT WORSE

Climate Change: The secretary-general of the United Nations gets around to making a serious statement on the state of the planet, but the statement turns out to be just plain silly. But he's not the only one making it. Addressing the U.N.'s annual climate change conference in Nairobi, Kenya, on Wednesday, Kofi Annan said global warming is as much of a threat as weapons of mass destruction.

We suppose we could dismiss the silly statement as that of a world figure playing to an audience on his way out of office. But we've heard the same statement too often from other supposedly rational leaders to brush it off. Hans Blix, for example. In 2003, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector told MTV: "I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict." Sure, it was a frivolous comment intended for a frivolous audience, but . . . Bill Clinton, supposedly one of our brightest presidents, insisted in May at the University of Texas that "climate change is more remote than terror, but a more profound threat to the future of the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren I hope all of you have." Then there's Al Gore. "I don't want to diminish the threat of terrorism at all; it is extremely serious," the former vice president told Australia's newspaper the Age last year. "But on a long-term global basis, global warming is the most serious problem we are facing."

Maybe these men just haven't thought about what's going on around them. On Tuesday, the day before Annan declared climate change as much of a threat as "conflict, poverty, the proliferation of deadly weapons," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said his country will go nuclear in just a few months. Some weapons experts say Ahmadinejad's regime could have an atomic weapon in a mere five years. Some say it's more like two.

Meanwhile, global warming, even if it proves to be real, will not begin to have an impact for generations. The U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the earth's temperature will rise 1.4 degrees to 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That works out to 0.14 degree to 0.58 degree a decade -- small changes over a lengthy span. The sort of climate change that concerns us is the warming from cities incinerated by nuclear weapons launched by Ahmadinejad or the equally crazed Kim Jong Il of North Korea, or by a terrorist group sponsored and supplied by those two.

Global warming remains nothing more than a theory. If it turns out to be real, there is still time to act -- if we want to act. We say "if" because there's evidence a warmer earth might be of great benefit to mankind: longer growing seasons (increased food production); warmer winters, with warmth occurring primarily at night (cutting heating bills and energy use); less disease; more rain (decreasing famine); and fewer cold-related deaths. "From a purely evolutionary point of view, warm periods have been exceptionally good to us," Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, told Wired magazine last year. "Cold periods have been the troublesome ages."

Far more troublesome would be a nuclear age in which rogue regimes and terrorists have access to atomic weapons.

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SUBURBS ACQUITTED

If absence makes the heart grow fonder in far-flung romances, it seems a bit of elbow-room does the same for neighbours. A new study says that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. The results challenge the accepted idea that suburban life is socially alienating a notion that's inspired everything from the Academy Award-winning American Beauty to Harvard professor Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone.

The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 per cent. "We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower," says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. "What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city."

The results are no surprise to Fayrouz Costa, who has lived in and loved the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, Ont., for the last 20 years. She has two young children and is constantly socializing with her neighbours, who take turns watching over each other's children while they play outside and house-sitting for those on vacation. "You couldn't give me a free house in the city and say, `Move here.' Honestly, I could never do it," she says. "There's just too many people, people are too close to each other and people are not friendly. I'm a chatterer and people don't chat in the city."

Costa is a member of her community centre, where she uses the fitness facilities five days a week and knows "almost everyone." She contrasts her lifestyle with that of her sister, who lives and works in Toronto, and concludes that she "would never leave the suburbs." "People are always in a rush to get where they need to go and they work a lot more," Costa says of life in the city. "A lot of the time in the suburbs, people have families and their life is a little more relaxed."

That "social homogeneity" may partly explain the closeness of neighbours in the suburbs, says Pierre Filion, a professor of urban planning at the University of Waterloo. Young children often act as social catalysts for their parents, and people in the suburbs tend to have more common ground than the diverse lifestyles crammed into a given city block, he says. "People (in the suburbs) are pretty much of the same social class, same social background and so on, which eases interaction between people," Filion says. "At the other extreme, you can have a whole bunch of people living in a condo, but you've got old people, young people, people in between. You won't have that much interaction because of the differences."

Brueckner says the UC Irvine study accounted for differences in social class, family structure and other factors, and found that people are still friendlier in the suburbs. The results suggest society needs to re-think some received wisdom about the evils of suburbia, he says, but other criticisms about the loss of green space and the costs of commuting still stand.

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Hollywood hypocrites outed

They insist that they are trying to save the planet, but Hollywood's green celebrities are seething over new criticism of their muddled environmental activism. The latest targets of internet watchdogs are the stars who drive electric or hybrid cars and then hop on private jets to fly around the world.

The environment has become one of Hollywood's most fashionable causes, with stars abandoning limousines at premieres for low fuel consumption cars. Yet several of the film industry's biggest names have fallen foul of internet sleuths who have compared their eco-friendly driving habits with their fondness for private aircraft. Julia Roberts was last week reported by the TMZ film buffs' website to be the owner of a Toyota Prius, the first commercially produced car with a hybrid electric-petrol engine. TMZ also noted Roberts travelled by private jet from Chicago to Los Angeles, consuming 2,100 gallons of fuel.

Other Prius drivers with a fondness for private jets include Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt, whose recent private charter to Namibia with his lover, Angelina Jolie, burnt an estimated 11,000 gallons of jet fuel - "enough to take a Prius to the moon", said TMZ.

George Clooney, one of Hollywood's most outspoken liberal activists, owns an electric minicar called a Tango, which drives 135 miles on a full battery. But he recently took a private jet to Tokyo, a 5,500-mile trip which consumed 7,000 gallons of fuel. Clooney's spokesman said the actor often had "no control" over his schedule, which is dictated by studio commitments.

Leonardo DiCaprio was one of the first celebrities to drive a Prius. He was also the latest star to fall foul of green scrutiny when the New York Post reported that he flew his mother, grandmother and girlfriend from Paris to Rome in a private jet for the Italian premiere of his latest film, The Departed.

Defenders of celebrity greens argue that the attention they bring to eco-issues is worth the ideological confusion, but others are less convinced. "If they flew on regular airlines they might be forgiven," said a contributor to TMZ. "But flying private jets makes them look like idiots."

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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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