Back home, Fielding asked these three questions of Australian Environmental Minister Environmental Penny Wong:

First: Is it the case that atmospheric CO₂ has increased 5 percent since 1998, while global temperature cooled during the same period?  If so, why did the temperature not increase, and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?

Wong’s answer:  No answer.

Second: Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?  If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO₂ emissions and in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?

Wong’s answer: Climatic events that occurred in the distant geological past are not relevant to policy concerned with contemporary climate change.

Ah, but Fielding is not talking about “the distant geological past.”  He is talking about the Little Ice Age, which ended only in 1850—making way for the Modern Warming that has raised global temperatures about half a degree since then. The LIA was preceded by the Medieval Warming ((950-1300 AD) and the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD).

Ice cores, seabed fossils and fossil pollen tell us the earth has had five previous abrupt global warmings just in the past 8,000 years. All of them were moderate. None gave us the runaway temperatures forecast by today’s unverified global climate models.

Third: Is it the case that all the computer models projected a steady increase in earth’s temperatures for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming, followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?  If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy?

Wong’s answer: Better climate models are on their way.  

Ah, the models that we used to project the runaway warming have been wrong. So we won’t trust the ice cores, tree rings, fossil pollen, cave stalagmites and a vast variety of other climate-change proxies. Instead, we’ll hope that the next set of unverified computer models will actually predict the climate.  

Fielding says Ms. Wong’s answers are not adequate to support a carbon tax that is likely to cost each Australian family about $4000 per year for a carbon tax of $30 per ton. Harvard’s Martin Feldstein thinks the carbon tax might have to go to $75 per ton to wring all the fossil fuels out of heating our houses and fertilizing our crops.

And even the alarmists admit these carbon taxes would only reduce the earth’s future warming by a barely-measurable one ten-thousandth of a degree C. The alarmists own math, CO₂ makes up only 3.8 percent of the atmosphere, humans release only about 4 percent of that, and it just doesn’t matter.

The latest report is that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has decided to delay his cap-and-tax bill for another year.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years. Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net.

Mrs. Obama’s moment came earlier this month when she invited fifth-grade students to join her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and share an early harvest from the White House Organic Garden. The menu:  brown rice, baked chicken and fresh snapped peas. We’re sure it was delicious.

Mrs. Obama understandably touted the freshness of the peas—and nothing’s fresher or more local than vegetables picked from a backyard garden. Unfortunately, Mrs. Obama would have us believe that modern farming’s food is less healthful and nutritious than food grown the old-fashioned, organic way. But, then, why do Africans today, eating all-organic diets, still expire 30 years younger than their Western counterparts? Why no age adjusted increase in cancer rates, except among smokers?

Could it be that the health of  the First World’s offspring is enhanced, not only by modern vaccines and pharmaceuticals, but by food abundance that is protected by the same life-saving principles of chemistry applied to fending off such natural pests as potato blight, bacterial wilt, leafhoppers, and aphids?

Marion Burros of The New York Times sneered about a critical letter to Mrs. Obama from the Mid-America Croplife Association, defending chemicals, that “the group euphemistically called ‘crop protection products.’” Apparently Ms. Burros hasn’t spent much time with a hoe in her hand, watching the Colorado potato beetles gnaw the leaves off her potato plants and spider mites sucking the juices from her beans and raspberries.  

The very heart of organic farming is a refusal to use industrial fertilizer. But without nitrogen fertilizer, the planet would immediately suffer the worst famine in all history, with half of humanity dying within a year or so. We don’t have enough manure to fertilize enough food organically. Famine is a harsh recipe coming from the First Lady of a rich country.

Similarly, the President has said on global warming, “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”  Fortunately for the world, not a single one of those claims is accurate.

• Sea levels have risen only 6 inches per century for the past 300 years—and they stopped rising in 2003.
• Any discussion of record drought should include the two century-long droughts that struck California in the 9^th and 14^th centuries. We’ve had nothing recent to match them.
• Antarctic sea ice extent has been record-large in recent years.
• The British Navy logged twice as many major, landfalling hurricanes per decade in the Caribbean during the Little Ice Age as were recorded during the “warming” of 1950-2000.
• We’ve had no “spreading famine” during the Modern Warming, just a doubling of world food prices as more corn and rapeseed were diverted from food to biofuels.

The global climate computer models, incredibly, have been programmed without any knowledge of the Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming and 500 previous global warmings that have arrived as part of the warming/cooling cycle every 1,500 years—thanks to the sun, cosmic rays, and low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into outer space.

The White House should double check its realities.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

“It seems every Australian has an opinion on the Rudd government’s emission trading scheme,” wrote Senator Fielding in The Australian on June 8.^th  “The one question, however, that no one seems to be asking, is whether or not we even need an emissions trading scheme at all?” 

Fielding now has an appointment to talk warming theories with Australia’s Environment Minister, Penny Wong. He wants to know how Minister Wong can be sure that humans have caused the recent warming—since global temperatures are now cooling though CO₂ levels are still rising.

Senator Fielding says 500 years ago the whole world “knew” the sun revolved around the Earth. Galileo dared challenge the prevailing dogma anyway—and was put under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Galileo’s story reminds Fielding of the present debate on climate change. “Opponents of the popular opinion that global warming is a direct result of carbon emissions, a group that includes many notable and distinguished scientists, are often derided and quickly dismissed. As an engineer, I have been trained to listen to both sides.”

Minister Wong said in a recent media interview: “We’ve had 13 of the 14 hottest years in history in the last 15 year.” This isn’t quite true; but even so, she is talking about recent history. Fielding is talking about the Medieval Warming 700 years ago, and the Roman Warming 2000 years ago—and more than 500 previous global warmings before that. The ice cores, fossil pollen and seabed sediments tell us those warmings were hotter than today.  

I know, because I met Fielding at the skeptics’ conference, and gave him a copy of the fully-referenced best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming—-Every 1,500 Years.

After Fielding returned home, he wrote, “The question of whether global warming is a new phenomenon or something that is just part of the naturally occurring 1500-year climate cycle was never raised in any of the discussions I have had with the Rudd government.”  

“After speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive.  I plan to put some of these question to Penny Wong and her advisers when we next sit down to discuss the carbon pollution reductions scheme, just as I did when I spoke to climate change experts in President Obama’s administration” during the week of June 1–5.

“Has the Minister seen [data] which shows that solar radiation is highly correlated to global temperature change, and if so, why can this not be a plausible alternative explanation for global warming?”

Senator Fielding has been harshly treated by Australian interviewers, but says the carbon emission reduction scheme “will unquestionably lead to thousands of Australians losing their jobs, more than 23,000 in the mining industry alone. It is a scheme that will send the cost of basic goods and services upwards at a time when we can least afford it and will leave the state governments $5.5 billion worse off by 2020. As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct. ”

 DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Unfortunately, the dairy export subsidies will make little difference to American dairymen, but they could have harsh impacts on New Zealand’s farm-dominated economy. Thus far, New Zealand has escaped the higher grain prices because they feed their cows mainly grass and turnips.

Our excuse on dairy export subsidies is that the EU did it first. But the real dairy problem is that both the EU and the U.S. have jacked up their own dairy production costs by diverting corn and rapeseed from feeding livestock to making biofuels. The ethanol and biodiesel games have doubled world feed grain prices and caused food riots in Mexico and Egypt.

The dairy export payments should be a huge red flag to the world. When push came to shove, the U.S. and the EU immediately fell into the old trap of punishing trade from innocent countries. That’s actually how we launched the Great Depression—with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930.

People have actually been predicting the “green trade wars” for years because developing countries have no obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. All the affluent countries are thus terrified that their carbon-emitting industries will flee to less-developed countries. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told a Congressional committee in March that America might well consider a “carbon tariff” on imports from China, India, and other developing countries if they “undercut” U.S. manufacturers. .  

Gary Huffbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics recently told National Public Radio, “Countries say, well, if we’re going to take measures [to combat global warming] we have to do something at the border to prevent the same product being produced abroad and just imported by our country. So those thoughts trigger potential for trade wars. So lawmakers here have added a provision to the greenhouse gas legislation that echoes the EU approach. It gives energy intensive companies like steelmakers, chemical plants, and paper mills the right to demand tariffs on imports if after five years they can prove unfair carbon competition” 

Environmentalists say the worries about China and India picking up high-carbon jobs are exaggerated—that most of America’s energy-intensive imports come from Canada or the EU. But they’re saying that today, before the carbon taxes have been imposed. With carbon taxes in place, the developing countries will look more attractive, Canada and the EU less so.  

Without low-cost imports from China and Colombia, meanwhile, the cost of shopping at Wal-Mart will escalate—even as U.S. exports are increasingly barred from both Kyoto member and non-member countries. Our investments in productive assets will be wasted, even as the U.S. jobs totals decline.

A carbon tariff would conflict with a U.S. pledge not to violate international trade rules, but Obama’s promise to cut greenhouse emission might easily override the vague “no trade war” commitment.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

New Zealand’s economy is almost completely dependent on its farm exports:  lamb, dairy products, beef and high-end white wines. Half of New Zealand’s carbon emissions come from cattle and sheep. If New Zealand taxes its cows and sheep hundreds of dollars per animal for methane emissions and manure handling fees, Argentina would almost immediately displace New Zealand’s farm exports. Argentina has more grass, more cattle, the potential for more lambs, a surging wine industry—and no Kyoto obligations.

Based on U.S. and Australian “discussions,” a 500-cow dairy might have to pay $250,000 per year for cattle emissions and manure handling permits, plus a hefty increase in its costs for low-carbon electricity and diesel.   An Argentine dairy would pay none of these increased costs—and every dollar of cost differential would be a further incentive for Argentine dairymen to expand their exports at the expense of New Zealand. 

That would leave Kiwi cities like Auckland and Christchurch without visible means of support.

I said this recently to several New Zealand government ministers and business leaders at a private dinner in Wellington. My message was not welcomed.  John Key’s new government seems to understand that New Zealand’s economy would be at terrible risk from carbon taxes—but its voters apparently don’t realize it.

The Clark government told New Zealand voters that the cost of “leading the world” with a carbon tax would be about $150 per year. That figure is laughably low. The British government now admits its new carbon tax law could cost as much as $27,000 per UK family.

The Key government has temporarily suspended the cap-and-trade, but has not dared repeal it. Meanwhile, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is installing his own cap-and-trade, and playing footsie with President Obama on “solidarity” with a U.S. carbon tax. If Australia and the U.S. agreed on some benchmark carbon tax, most New Zealanders would expect their country to join in.  

Never mind that the earth’s global warming stopped after 1998 because the sun has gone into a startling quiet period.  That’s why New Zealand’s many glaciers have been growing recently instead of receding. Never mind that even full member compliance with Kyoto would “avoid” only about 0.05 degree C of warming over the next 50 years—by the alarmists’ own math.

The urbanites in New Zealand don’t really appreciate the sophisticated management that juggles pastures and feed crops that produce milk, cheese and Merino wool.  They love the wine, but don’t understand the massive per-acre investments needed to turn their grapes into award-winning vintages.

Meanwhile, Obama’s U.S. government has just punished New Zealand with trade-distorting dairy export subsidies–because our corn ethanol program has pushed our cost of dairy feed too high. World corn prices have doubled in real terms, and may go higher as our ethanol mandates keep rising. That jacks up the U.S. cost of “alternative fuels” even further–while New Zealand will have to file a well-justified case against America under the World Trade Organization rules.

Ah, what a tangled web we’re weaving, rather than admit the Emperor of Global Warming has no clothes.

Sources: 

British carbon law costs:  Daily Mail, May 5, 2009

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

President Obama recently warned the nation of “storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.” The Culbin Sands may help us find out whether such massive storms will or won’t be more common in the rest of the 21^st century.

Two British researchers have examined the dune fields, which conspicuously dot the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe. Michelle Clarke of England’s Nottingham University and Helen Rendell of Loughborough University found the Culbin Sands—and much of the other notable storm evidence—dated between 1500 and 1900 AD. Those were the years of the Little Ice Age. They also found several earlier periods when dune-building storms were common—including the Dark Ages from 600 to 950 AD, the unnamed cooling before the Roman Warming, which ended about 200 B.C., and two strong cold periods in prehistory about 2000 and 4,000 B.C.

“The Holocene record of sand drift in western Europe includes episodes of [sand] movement corresponding to periods of Northern Hemisphere cooling” they report. 

Note that they say “cooling’ Not “warming.” That’s logical, since storms get their power from the temperature differential between the polar regions and the equator. During a warm period, the Arctic may get 3–4 degrees C closer to the temperature of the equator, calming the storm activity. During a cold period, however, the Arctic and Antarctic may get up to 6–8 degrees cooler compared to the equator. This adds lots more power to the storms.  

Clarke and Rendell use “optically stimulated luminescence” to date when grains of sand were first buried in a dune or sand sheet. These sand dates can be compared with carbon 14 dating of the associated peat and buried soils to produce a storm/calm history for a given piece of land.  The Clarke and Rendell work confirms—again—the solar-linked 1,500-year warming-cooling cycle. These Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles shift global temperatures sharply every 700 years or so—usually about 2-4 degrees C at the latitude of New York and Paris.

If today’s warming had been caused by the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles instead of by humans burning fossil fuels, the timing and the magnitude of the temperature change would both be about right. The cyclic forecast for the rest of the 21^st century would then be for some modest extra warming, probably less than 0.5 degree C. This would probably come in a series of 30–40 year spurts up and down—like the past cooling that lasted from 1940 to 1975, and the warming that followed from 1976 to1998.

What about tropical hurricanes?  The British Navy stationed wooden sailing ships in the Caribbean during the last part of the Little Ice Age. Their ships’ logs recorded more than twice as many major, land-falling hurricanes per decade from 1700 to 1850 as we’ve recoded in the last half of the 20^th century.

Keep your home insurance current even so. 

Sources: 

President Obama’s storminess prediction—presented on videotape at the California Governor’s Conference on Global Warming, Nov. 18, 2008.

Dune-building storms of the past:  Michelle Clarke and Helen Rendell, 2009, “The Impact of North Atlantic Storminess on western European coasts,” Quaternary International, Vol. 195, pp. 31-41.

British Navy Little Ice Age hurricane records compared with late 20^th century:  J.B. Elsner et al., 2000, “Spatial Variations in Major U.S. Hurricane Activity:  Statistics and a Physical Mechanism.” Journal of Climate, Vol. 13,  pp. 2293-2305.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

• They force consumers to bid against themselves on food and fuel, artificially driving up the prices of both.

• Biofuels take huge amounts of land to produce each gallon—and land is the planet’s scarcest resource. Farmers know they must double food and feed production over the next 40 years to adequately feed the expected 8 billion people and we already use most of America’s good farm land.

• If you believe atmospheric carbon is a problem, be aware that when grassland is converted to cropland  to grow biofuels, we incur a “carbon debt” as the stored carbon in the soil gasses into the air. This aggravates greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere—for decades into the future.

The most urgent problem, however, is the staggering cost of biofuels. Government subsidies for oil and natural gas totaled just 10 cents per megawatt hour in 2007, according to the Energy Information Agency. Converted to electricity, corn ethanol and other biofuels got 19 times as much subsidy per unit of delivered energy—$19.52 per megawatt-hour.

Coal got 44 cents per megawatt-hour in subsidies during 2007, while wind turbines got $23.37 and solar panels got $24.34 per MW-h!

Nuclear power produces carbon-free electricity, and is subsidized at only $1.59 per MW-h. However, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu just announced that he won’t open the Yucca Mountain storage facility, so bye-bye to more nuclear power.

For all those subsidy dollars, the EIA says wind and solar provided only 1.1 percent of our electricity in 2008—after doubling during the Bush years. They’re now only 0.2 percent of our total energy package. Ethanol displaced just 1.9 percent of our oil use. (My thanks go to Patrick Bedard of Car & Driver for teasing those numbers out of the voluminous EIA data.)

Cheerleaders for corn ethanol say the diverted corn doesn’t much impact food costs.
But, even with ethanol plants going bankrupt, corn is still far more expensive than four years ago. As the ethanol mandates expand sharply in the years ahead, expect food prices to rise accordingly. Corn growers may applaud higher prices, but shouldn’t they admit the food-price reality?

Actually, the U.S. is gaining energy independence in one area—the huge amounts of modestly priced natural gas, from shale, that are now hitting the market. Oil prices are up 12 percent since the beginning of 2009, but natural gas prices are down 41 percent. We’re producing the shale gas with computer-guided horizontal drilling, then “frakking” the shale layers with high-pressure liquids and sand to release more gas. Hugely productive new fields are being developed: Texas (the Barnett shale); Louisiana (the Haynesfield shale); and across Appalachia, from western New York clear down through West Virginia (the Marcellus shale). An industry-backed study sees 2.2 billion cubic feet of gas, enough to last nearly 100 years at current use rates.

Natural gas, of course, emits about 60 percent as much CO₂ per unit as burning coal.  “The availability of natural–gas generation enables us to be much more courageous in charting a transition to a low-carbon economy,” says Jason Grumet, an Obama advisor with the National Commission on Energy Policy.

Expect the sharp increase in natural gas production to flow into more gas-fired power plants, along with a more gradual increase in propane-powered car and truck fleets.

We can use the same drilling technology for the 400 billion barrels of light, sweet crude oil in the Bakken shale formation that underlies the Dakotas, Montana, and Saskatchewan.

Can someone remind me why we’re subsidizing corn ethanol?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

However, the Humane Society of the United States claims in the wake of the “Mexican” flu outbreak that “factory farms are the fast track to disaster.” They essentially are saying that confinement hog farms are the flu problem. If the HSUS is right, America’s big confinement farms should be the epicenter of the new virus outbreak. But, they’re not.

There is a big Mexican confinement hog farm near the village of one early flu victim. But that farm has neither sick pigs nor sick workers. Smithfield Farms says it has found no clinical signs or symptoms of the flu on its Mexican farms.

Is HSUS just railing against its favorite “factory farming” hate target?

We already knew that the H1N1 flu virus, which has been around for a while, contains genetic material from pigs, poultry, and humans. Flu viruses are biological sluts.  But hog and poultry confinement farms are all “shower-in and shower-out” facilities, with protective clothing, disposable booties and the whole biosafety program. They’re off-limits to most visitors. They all prevent contact with wild birds and animals, and minimize the number of people interacting with the critters. The farmers do this to protect their investment in the pigs, but this also protects humanity. 

Virologist Ruben Donis of the Centers for Disease Control thinks the currently-feared H3 flu virus variant started years ago in the American Midwest, where it didn’t kill healthy pigs—but it has since made a trip to Asia to pick up new material. He says it could have been brought to Mexico by a pig, or by a person.

Dr. Donis points out that this isn’t a “big farm” issue.  An American small farm with 50 pigs typically buys feed and supplies from vendors that go farm-to-farm—and the small farms don’t take the big farms’ biosafety precautions.

If it comes to that, American farms a hundred years ago raised horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, and sheep in the same farmyard. All those species carry flu viruses—it was flu virus heaven! The kids from down the road came to play. The schoolyards rang with the normal coughs and sneezes—and sometimes the abnormal ones.

Where today would we look for villages that keep poultry, pigs, and people in close interaction?  Perhaps in Mexico? How about in Asia, the source of annual “Asian flu” epidemics that kill 36,000 Americans per year?  The World Health Organization is trying desperately to get Asia’s poultry and pigs separated, and raised in confinement—to protect public health worldwide. Ask HSUS why the WHO feels this “factory farm” campaign is so urgent?

Understand that most of humanity’s epidemic diseases evolved as viruses shuttled back and forth between humans and their domesticated animals due to their literally living together. We got smallpox and measles from cattle, cholera from hogs, yellow fever from monkeys, and influenza from swine and poultry.

In fact, the specialized hog and poultry farms are an important health precaution. Most specialized hog farms raise no poultry, and few confinement poultry farms raise hogs. Thus, the viruses have only one livestock species and a few humans from which to steal DNA.

This isn’t your grandfather’s farmyard, thank goodness.  

The HSUS just doesn’t like confinement farms under any circumstances. They rush to condemn the big farms at every opportunity, lack of evidence be damned. But they also want us to give up eating meat—and want us to give up our pets. The HSUS, fortunately, takes no part in running your local animal shelter.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Beware, however. Global warming alarmists are particularly desperate to claim that the Antarctic is “warming first” —as the computerized climate models predicted the Polar Regions would. That’s a problem. Satellite readings show the Antarctic ice is increasing by 45 billion tons per year and the Antarctic sea ice is at record-large extent.

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, puts melting Antarctic ice into long-term perspective. Easterbrook says there’s no way to date corals that died 120,000 years ago within an accuracy of 25–50 years. Dating within tens of thousands of years is more likely.

Secondly, he points out that the average temperature in the Antarctic is about 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. In order to melt any ice at all, you’d have to raise the temperature of the region by 87 degrees F just to get to the melting point of ice. To do this in 50 years is—incredible! 

Third, notes Easterbrook, the volume of ice in the Antarctic is about 30 million cubic kilometers. To melt most of this ice in ten years, 2–3 million cubic kilometers would have had to melt—per year; and, remember, the average temperature is -55 degrees F. This is far beyond anything even the computer models have imagined.

It is certainly likely that ice melted 120,000 years ago during the very warm Eemian Warming. But what produced the heat for that melting? With no humans to blame, it must have been the sun. If the sun can vary that much in the geologically recent past, how can we be sure that it hasn’t been the sun raising the earth’s temperature in the past 150 years? 

When the last Ice Age began to end, glaciers covered North America as far south as Ohio and New York’s Long Island. Then the sun caused the planet to enter a warming phase.  At its maximum warming rate, however, Easterbrook notes that the glaciers melted at about 1 meter per century.

Today, those huge glaciers are gone, and the oceans have already recovered about 400 feet of depth. Only two ice caps are left, with nearly all of it in the Antarctic and the rest in Greenland. Easterbrook does not see the potential for sea level rising faster than the one meter per century at the end of the last Ice Age—particularly with the slow, erratic warming that has occurred over the past 150 years.

John Stone of the University of Washington noted in a 2003 paper that glaciers and ice caps take thousands of years to melt because their surfaces reflect so much of the sun’s heat away. He says that even the relatively vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, at least 10,000 years past its most recent Ice Age, still has another 7,000 years worth of ice to melt. Another Little Ice Age—or a big one—is certain to come along before that process is complete.

Ian Allison of the Australian Antarctic Division says a recent meeting of the Antarctic Treaty Nations noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades,” and that recent ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring show no large-scale ice-melt over most of Antarctica.

Remember Stone’s watchword—ice caps take thousands of years to melt because they deflect so much of the sun’s heat away. It takes 80 times as much heat to melt a one-inch cube of ice as to raise the temperature of the water one degree C. Based on real-life physics, the Antarctica cannot melt rapidly. 

Sources:

Sea Rise projected from Coral: “Coral Study in Mexico Suggests Rapid Sea Rise from Warming” N.Y. Times, April 16, 2009.

Antarctic gaining ice:  Curt Davis et al, “Snowfall Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise, Science, Vol. 308, 2005, pp. 1898–1901.

Antarctic sea ice extent:  “Earth’s temperature 8^th-warmest on record so far,” USA Today, April 16, 2009:

Slow melt of Antarctic ice:  John Stone et al., “Holocene Deglaciation of Marie Byrd Land, West Antarctic,” Science 299, pp 99-102, 2003.

Antarctic Treaty nations meeting: “Report:  Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking,” Fox News, April 18, 2009.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Equally interesting, Goddard says this year’s March was just 0.03 degrees warmer than March of 1981, a year when the El Nino/La Nina index was approximately the same as today. Does that mean the planet’s net warming is only three hundredths of a degree C over the last 30 years?  Thanks to Czech physicist Lubos Motl for spotting that relationship.

Meanwhile, the Director of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, recently sent a letter to President Obama saying that Obama has “only four years left to save the earth” from “runaway warming.” He told the London Observer in February that “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”  Hansen maintains that recent warming has pushed the planet close to a “tipping point” for runaway warming. What recent warming?  Three hundredths of a degree C over 30 years, with temperatures still declining, doesn’t seem worth ruining the world’s economies.

Goddard’s famous computerized climate warming predictions continue to be wrong. In contrast, sunspots predicted the temperature rise from 1976-98, and sunspots began predicting the current cooling in 2000. Earth’s temperatures have demonstrably been following changes in the earth’s cloudiness, which are linked—evidently thru cosmic rays—to the recently-declining level of solar activity.

The sunspots and cosmic rays have a 79 percent correlation with our thermometer record since 1860. Meanwhile the CO₂ correlation is a mere 22 percent. I love repeating that comparison!  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change already admitted in 2001 that it’s modeled “scenarios” cannot accurately predict cloud impacts on temperatures.

In addition to the sunspots, NASA’s Jason satellite has confirmed the Pacific Ocean moving into its cool phase. Such cooling phases last 30 years or so. During our last cooling phase, from 1940-75, global warming should have surged if caused by industrial CO₂ emissions. The world’s whole industrial revolution really kicked off in 1945. Soon after that, the postwar explosion in auto emissions hit worldwide.

Hansen still claims that global warming is occurring rapidly but has been masked by aerosols in the atmosphere. The “lost heat” was supposedly lurking in the oceans. However, 3000 new Argo floats are giving us the most accurate sea temperatures ever recorded, and they say the oceans stopped warming in 2003. If the oceans aren’t warming, neither is the planet.

The ongoing cooling makes it horribly difficult for President Obama to issue his long-promised multi-trillion-dollar tax on energy. Twenty-six Blue Dog Democrats recently voted against letting a carbon cap-and-trade ”tax” be attached to the budget—and thus pass with less than the 60 votes otherwise required. It may now be left to the Environmental Protection Agency to declare CO₂ a human health hazard and try to regulate global warming under the Clean Air Act.

We’ll need still-bigger “global warming tea parties” if the EPA issues regulations to control greenhouse emissions. The ballooning cost of such regulations, in both carbon taxes and exported jobs, would dwarf even our huge new federal debt load in the long term.

Sources:

March global temperatures: Goddard Institute for Space Studies web site, Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index, giss/nasa.gov/tabledata.GLB.Ts+dSST.txt, 4/15/ 2009.

Net warming of 0.03 degree C over 30 years: Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame, motls.blogspot.com/2009/04/giss-march-2009-coolest-march-in-this.html.

James Hansen quotes:

”NASA’s Hansen Warns Barack Obama on Climate Change,” The Guardian, Jan. 1, 2009.

“Coal-fired Power Plants are Death Factories. Close Them,” Commentary by James Hansen, The Observer, London, Feb 15, 2009.

IPCC’s inability to model cloud impacts:  IPCC Report AR-3, 2001, section 7.2.2.4 Cloud-radiative feedback processes.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net