Various thinly supported theories are put forward to suggest we are mistaken about global heating threatening the existence of every living organism on our planet Earth.

Here are a few observations on this subject from a recent email exchange with a wise friend, whose judgment i generally hold in very high respect and esteem.

And would you gamble, Jim, on this thinly supported theory, if you had the ability to control one or the other set of variables that are proposed to be causal in anticipated catastrophic climate change?

My read on the recent colder winters is from James Lovelock, who observed
"Despite the heat absorbed, the global temperature did not rise; in fact it fell slightly, perhaps because to melt ice it takes eighty-one times as much heat as to raise the same quantity of water one degree. This property of ice is called its “latent heat.” You can see this yourself by making a near full cup of tea with boiling water. It will be too hot even to sip. Adding cold water to cool it quickly rarely works; but add a single ice cube and it will be cool enough to drink in a few seconds. In a few more years all that floating ice may go, and then the sun will be free to heat the dark Arctic Ocean, No longer will it have the Sisyphean task of trying to melt white, reflecting ice that rejects 80 percent of the sunlight it receives so that to melt it consumes most of the radiant energy that would otherwise warm the ocean."
Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia- A Final Warning. New York, NY: Basic Books 2009, p. 16-17.

For gambling odds, see this excellent discussion
Risks of global heating
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg

Blessings

Dan

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Forwarded by: Jim and Andrea MacKimmie
Fw: Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

This is the kind of information that has been ignored and suppressed by the fans of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It indicates the influence of Man is a negligible factor in the climatology of the Earth, and will remain so. Man’s hubris and ignorance continue to be the most detrimental impediments to his health, peace and happiness on this Earth. In fact, the only truly significant geophysical problem being significantly impacted by human indulgence and stupidity is pollution of the oceans, and while that will not in any way permanently damage the Earth, which over a long time can self purify, it might engender a temporary, accelerating toxicity that would endanger mankind much faster than it has even been imagined Global Warming ever could.   jb

Earth on the Brink of an Ice  Age

by Gregory F.  Fegel

The earth is now on the brink of  entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence  from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide  our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve  thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and  then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000  years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores,  the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all  demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each  last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each  lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate  data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the  three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles.  The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over  a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earthâs orbit, which changes over a  period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as  the earthâs "wobble," which gradually rotates the direction of the earthâs  axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice  Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the  amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the  cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

Elements of the astronomical  theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician  Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph  Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the  Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the  prestigious journal Science published a landmark paper by John Imbrie,  James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled "Variations in the Earth's orbit:  Pacemaker of the Ice Ages," which described the correlation which the trio of  scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean  sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since  the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to  account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the  Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in  encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.

In their 1976 paper Imbrie,  Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based  on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "· must be qualified in two  ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic  trends ö and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of  fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they  are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer.  Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results  indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards  extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

During the 1970s the famous  American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory  that "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human  industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the  theory of "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW) has gradually become accepted  as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has  inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to  prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence  that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous "hockey stick" graph  which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film An  Inconvenient Truth. The "hockey stick" graph shows an acute upward  spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued  through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted  when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern  Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears  that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or  surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold  temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory  is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years  at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years ö evidence  which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from  paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation  for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age  maximums and interglacials.

In 1999 the British journal  Nature published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores  collected at the Russiaâs Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The  Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures,  atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting  from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present  time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice  Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern,  the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an  electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in  global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred  years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global  CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2  is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase  in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.

The reason that global CO2  levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold  water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated  beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment.  We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent  them from loosing their "fizz," which is a feature of their carbonation, or  CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age  cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2  into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by  the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earthâs temperature, we  should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight  hundred years after the end of the earthâs current Interglacial warm period.  We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global  CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the worldâs  oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph  reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to  the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four  hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every  110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked  at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

Today we are again at the peak,  and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter  the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it.  The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle,  with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data  that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a  wanton disregard for the "big picture" of long-term climate change. The data  from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology,  paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another  Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can  occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of  Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people  throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable  Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere  uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

This article originally appeared in Pravda.