Posted on 01/03/2008 7:40:48 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reasonsolar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.
It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizationsin particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixotes duel with the windmill?
Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currentsan entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissionsa point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.
Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the oceans surface warms up, it produces the champagne effect. Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.
Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollutiona factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.
Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolutionthe phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.
Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influencenot on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.
Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Mans influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.
Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.
The principal among those diverse links is Earths reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.
What cant be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.
Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the northbut Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.
Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
And how do we know it's a peak until after it's over?
~~Anthropogenic Global Warming ping~~
A cold spell soon? It’s already here in Kentucky! We got a cold front at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and another less than twelve hours later. It has been below 20F ever since.
Been a kind of average winter so far. -20 to zero most of the time. +5 would be vastly more comfortable.
The old timers here in the Pacific North West know something very weird is going on off the coast. Under water volcanic activity has all but wiped out the salmon. People at the top know all about it but they remain silent. Magma activity is driven by the sun’s magnetic properties.
Done and done! :)
He is basing that on the duration of the sun cycles which are known.
Looks Nice,...YUMmmy
I knew it!!!
THANK YOU!
This is the same point I have been trying to make over this whole Globull Warming nonsense!
NOBODY has factored in the effect increased temps will have on cloud cover, and the resulting cooling effect of increased cloud cover....
Ugh...I can’t handle the cold weather anymore....
I hope he listened to the adage to "make hay while the sun shines" and stored up enough of that hay in some Tennessee cave.
A fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Elsewhere, the paper says we will have a cold spell in 100,000 years.
The second point is ridiculous. Roughly every 100,000 years for the past million years, the earth has gone through an Ice Age/warming cycle. The Ice Age generally lasts about 80,000 years, the warm spell about 20,000. We are close (a thousand years or two) to the end of our latest warm cycle. These changes seem to come rather quickly. Are they caused by major disasters? I have been looking as have others. After Toba volcano 74,000 years ago, there was a significant downturn in the most recent ice age. After Sakara-jima volcano 22,000 years ago there was a further downturn. Toba left a crater 18 by 65 miles. Sakara-jima left a crater 15 miles in diameter. There is a recent FR thread about a possible meteor strike about 13,000 years ago which may have caused an abrupt regression in our most recent warming phase called the Younger Dryas.
There must be many other events out there. The Yellowstone Caldera event around 600,000 years ago may have triggered the Ice Age of that period. Yellowstone has been heating up a bit recently, is it due for another major blow? Meanwhile, we need to give serious thought to reducing the world population, before nature does it for us and much more cruelly.
Someone at work told me that her relative in Florida (!) reported a first thing in the morning temp of 18 F (?!?).
Neither can I. I really don’t like snow shovelling when it’s below about +5. I know of one man who was a Laborer in the Laborers Union who enjoyed shovelling snow at -40 and he was assigned shovelling walkways and doorways at Prudhoe when everybody else would be in the warmup shack all day. It’s not for everybody.
Northern Florida can get quite cold and experiences freezing temperatures every winter. Even so, 18 seems slightly extreme.
My house in Miami, which was built in the 50's, has a fireplace. There are evenings when it comes in handy. My memory is that back in the 70's, there were times every winter that saw temps in the 30's. We haven't seen that for a while, but 40's happen every winter a few nights. In any case, I keep wood handy.
Ernest, does Sorokhtin’s thinking find support elsewhere in the scientific community?
Thanks.
A relative in the Tampa area had a space heater for those extra-cold times. Of course, cold is relative... :’)
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