PRNewswire/ — A new book that is bound to becontroversial in public policy and environmental circles says that theEarth has a moderate, natural warming roughly every 1,500 years caused by asolar- linked cycle. The current Modern Warming may be mostly due to thatnatural cycle and not human activity, say the book’s authors, well-known climate physicist Fred Singer and Hudson
Institute economist Dennis Avery.
“Unstoppable Global Warming-Every 1500 Years” (Rowman & Littlefield,276 pages, $24.95) assembles physical and historical evidence of the natural climate cycle that ranges from ancient records in Rome, Egypt, andChina; to 12,000 antique paintings in museums; to Vikings’ tooth enamel in Greenland cemeteries; and to high-tech analyses of ice cores, seabed sediments, tree rings, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites.
“The Romans wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain in the first century,” says Avery, “and then it got too cold during the Dark Ages. Ancient tax records show the Britons grew their own wine grapes in the 11th century, during the Medieval Warming, and then it got too cold during theLittle Ice Age. It isn’t yet warm enough for wine grapes in today’s Britain. Wine grapes are among the most accurate and sensitive indicatorsof temperature and they are telling us about a cycle.
They also indicate that today’s warming is not unprecedented.” “We have lots of physical evidence for the 1,500-year cycle,” says Singer. “Yet we don’t have physical evidence that human-emitted CO2 is adding significantly to the natural cycle. The current warming started in 1850, too early to be blamed on industries and autos.”
Singer notes that humanity learned of the 1,500-year cycle only recently, from the first Greenland ice cores brought up in 1983. The cycle was too long and moderate to be observed by earlier peoples without thermometers and written records. The Greenland ice cores showed the 1,500-year cycle going back 250,000 years. It raises temperatures at the latitude of New York and Paris by 1-2 degrees C for centuries at a time,more at the North and South Poles, with a global average of 0.5 degrees C.
In 1987, the first Antarctic ice core showed the cycle extending backthrough the last 400,000 years and four Ice Ages-and demonstrated the cycle was indeed global.
There is also evidence of the 1,500-year cycle in seabed sediments from six oceans, in ancient tree rings from around the Northern Hemisphere,
in glacier advances and retreats from Greenland to New Zealand, and in cave stalagmites from every continent including South Africa. The North American Pollen Database shows nine complete reorganizations of the continent’s trees and plants in the past 14,000 years, or one every 1,650 years. “The deepest seabed sediment cores show the cycle has been going on for at least a million years,” says Avery.
Sunspot observations over the past 400 years, along with modern analysis of carbon and beryllium isotopes, link the 1,500-year cycle to variations recently detected by satellites in the sun’s irradiance. Antarctic ice studies show global temperatures tracking closely with atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. However, Singer and Avery note the studies also show that temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes by about 800 years. Thus, more warming has produced more atmospheric CO2, rather than more CO2 producing global warming. This make ssense, say the authors, because the oceans hold vastly more CO2 than the air, and warming forces water to release some its gases. Singer and Avery say that the science of the natural cycle runs counter to what many believe and fear will happen as a result of man-made global warming:
- * Wild species won’t become extinct in our warming because they’ve been through at least 600 previous warmings, including the Holocene Warming just 5,000 years ago that was much warmer than today.
- * The seas won’t rise to drown New York before the next cooling, because 90 percent of the world’s remaining ice is in the melt-resistant Antarctic. Even a 5 degree C warming would decrease its ice mass by only 1.5 percent, over centuries.
- * Warming won’t bring famine, because it brings what crops like — longer growing seasons, more sunlight, and few untimely frosts. More CO2 also stimulates plants’ growth, and enhances their water use efficiency.
“We hope our book will help calm the rampant hysteria about globalwarming and the flawed Greenhouse models,” emphasizes Avery. “We should be using our resources and technology to find the best ways to adapt to the inevitable but moderate warming to come, not to study one climate model after another, scare people to death, and pass crippling ‘environmental’ legislation that would deny the world the economic growth it needs to overcome poverty, the greatest problem of all.”
For more, read the discussion (PDF) Avery and Singer held at the Hudson Institute November 9, 2006.
Also posted at Mike’s America.
Report: Bush officials interfered, sought to mislead public on global warming
The Democratic chairman of a House panel examining the government’s response to climate change said
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator — 1/31/2007 @ 10:36 am
Finally, someone supporting the “its natural” theory I have long suspected from reading history and wondering why things were not the same then as now. Climate is cyclic on a scale unreconizable by mans fast paced clock, climate operates on a geological clock which takes centuries or millenia to tick away and change. I suppose President Bush is responsible for the global warming which brought wine growth to Britian during the Roman era.
Comment by Richard Nixon — 2/1/2007 @ 7:08 am
I love that trackback from “unpartisan” Yeah right!
Leave it to the new Dem majority to investigate the Bush Administration for trying to slant Global Warming all the while they are doing everything they can to shut up, shut down and defund any scientist who dares to disagree with their gloom and doom, it’s all man’s fault crapola.
Comment by Mike's America — 2/1/2007 @ 10:15 am
Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change
WMO International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones – Nov/Dec 2006 http://www.wmo.ch/web/arep/arep-home.html
1. Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.
2. No individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change.
3. The recent increase in societal impact from tropical cyclones has largely been caused by rising concentrations of population and infrastructure in coastal regions.
4. Tropical cyclone wind-speed monitoring has changed dramatically over the last few decades, leading to difficulties in determining accurate trends.
5. There is an observed multi-decadal variability of tropical cyclones in some regions whose causes, whether natural, anthropogenic or a combination, are currently being debated. This variability makes detecting any long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity difficult.
6. It is likely that some increase in tropical cyclone peak wind-speed and rainfall will occur if the climate continues to warm. Model studies and theory project a 3-5% increase in wind-speed per degree Celsius increase of tropical sea surface temperatures.
7. There is an inconsistency between the small changes in wind-speed projected by theory and modeling versus large changes reported by some observational studies.
8. Although recent climate model simulations project a decrease or no change in global tropical cyclone numbers in a warmer climate, there is low confidence in this projection. In addition, it is unknown how tropical cyclone tracks or areas of impact will change in the future.
9. Large regional variations exist in methods used to monitor tropical cyclones. Also, most regions have no measurements by instrumented aircraft. These significant limitations will continue to make detection of trends difficult.
10. If the projected rise in sea level due to global warming occurs, then the vulnerability to tropical cyclone storm surge flooding would increase.
Comment by Richard Nixon — 2/2/2007 @ 9:33 am
It is too bad that so many people see this as a left/right or Dem/Repub issue, whereas it is really a scientific issue.
It is too bad that so many people get their science from books like Singer and Avery’s when neither of them is a climate scientist.
If one makes the effort to learn something about the actual science (say, by going to http://www.realclimate.org) then it becomes apparent that Singer and
Avery are amateurs who present a simplistic picture. They rely on the fact that most readers do not know enough science - certainly not enough climate science - to raise the most obvious, basic questions. So they (think they) can get away with dismissing the correlation between temperature and CO2 levels in the ice cores by pointing out that the temps started to rise before the CO2 levels did, something that the climate scientists pointed out long before they did. They rely on the hope that most people will not know that scientists do not claim that CO2 caused the warming at the end of each ice age, but instead that changes in the amount of solar radiation that gets to the surface and is absorbed varies on a regular cycle due to changes in the Earth’s orbit and in the tilt of its rotation axis (do a search on Milankovitch cycles). But these changes in solar insolation are not enough to produce the temperature changes we see at the beginning and end of ice ages…only about 20% of the warming or cooling is explained this way. The rest of it is explained by changes in CO2 that are induced by the warming that is set off by the Milankovitch cycle…the CO2 amplifies the effect to produce the degree of warming observed.
Of course, Singer and Avery do not want us to know this because it would demolish the point they are trying to make. Their book is one such example after another.
Comment by LA Coleman — 2/10/2007 @ 7:01 pm
LA Coleman:
It’s too bad that people like you totally misrepresent the science and polticize this issue then whine and complain about it.
I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your screed earlier so I could go point by point and educate you on both the scienctific and political dimensions of the problem, but something tells me it would be a waste of time to do so.
It suffices to say that until you people honestly admit to the political motivations behind your advocacy that this issue will remain contentious and unresolved.
Stop trying to force your political views down our throats in the name of science.
Comment by Mike's America — 2/24/2007 @ 10:27 am