THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 99, June 10, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
GLOBAL WARMING: SOME INCONVENIENT GLACIERS
By Dennis T. Avery
ALBERT GORE, GLOBAL WARMING THEORY, POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM, & THE HISTORY OF GLACIAL ACTIVITY -- A
NEW SCIENTIFIC, PEER-REVIEWED STUDY PRODUCES EVIDENCE DESTROYING THE FOUNDATION STONE OF
ENVIRONMENTALIST IDEOLOGY: THE THEORY THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS CAUSED BY INCREASED CARBON
DIOXIDE EMISSIONS PRODUCED BY HUMAN ACTIVITY
FULL STORY:
Al Gore, Liberal Leftist Democrat and pompous apostle of global warming theory and environmentalist ideology, says the
world’s glaciers are melting because humanity has emitted too much carbon dioxide.
However, a new peer-reviewed study shows that, in South America‘s Andes Mountains, the glaciers’ advances and retreats
have not been governed by carbon dioxide, but by small variations in the sun’s intensity.
The study, led by P.J. Polissar of the University of Massachusetts, found that Andean glaciers expanded only four times
during the 600 years of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1250 AD to 1850. Each of those glacier advances occurred during
a solar minimum, when the sun’s lowered activity apparently dropped the mountain-top temperatures by 2 to 4 degrees
Centigrade (Celcius) and increased precipitation by about 20 percent.
The Polissar team’s report, "Solar Modulation of Little Ice Age Climate in the Tropical Andes," was recently published
online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team studied the glaciers’ moraines — piles of rocks, soil, tree trunks, and other glacial debris left behind when the
glaciers retreated. Then they matched the glacial debris with the sediment layers in nearby mountain lakes. The pronounced
seasonality in the Andes precipitation allows the researchers to count years in the sediments and precisely date the glacial
advances.
The Andes glacier study not only links glacial advances and retreats with the sun, but emphasizes that the earth’s glaciers
have often retreated — and even disappeared — during past centuries, long before humans built cars and smokestacks.
Most of the Andes glaciers must have disappeared during the Holocene Warming that ended just 5,000 years ago.
Temperatures then were as much as 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today’s. So far, the Modern Warming has produced
about only 0.8 degrees Centigrade of total temperature rise in its 150 years.
The sun has been linked to earth’s climate changes for the past 400 years — by sunspot records. Early astronomers noted
that the two coldest periods of the Little Ice Age occurred when there were virtually no sunspots on the sun. The Sporer
Minimum lasted from 1420 to 1570, and the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710.
The solar-earth linkage came to the fore again in the 1980s, when researchers brought up the first long ice cores from
Greenland and the Antarctic. The 400,000 years of temperature history contained in the ice cores clearly showed a moderate,
natural cycle that raised temperatures at the latitude of New York and Paris by about 2 degrees Centigrade, and then lowered
them by a similar amount. The cycles averaged about 1500 years in length. Carbon 14 and beryllium 10 isotopes in the ice
clearly linked this temperature cycle to the sun.
The question for Al Gore is not whether our temperatures are rising; the key question is why they’re rising. Antarctic ice
cores tell us that temperatures and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have tracked closely together through recent Ice Ages,
but the carbon dioxide changes have lagged behind the temperature changes by about 800 years.
Higher temperatures have produced more atmospheric carbon dioxide, rather than carbon dioxide producing higher
temperatures! That’s because most of the planet’s carbon dioxide is stored in the oceans, and, as the seawater warms, it
can’t hold as much carbon dioxide.
If carbon dioxide is the driving climate force, why did the earth begin warming in 1850, while human carbon dioxide emissions
didn’t start to really expand until about 1940? Mr. Gore doesn’t tell us the answer.
Why did the earth’s temperatures decline from 1940 to 1975, even as carbon dioxide emissions were soaring? Mr. Gore
doesn’t say.
How warm will New York get in the Modern Warming? Apparently, Mr. Gore can’t tell us, but a total of 2 degrees Centigrade
seems likely — based on the history in the ice cores.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and is the Director of the Institute's Center for
Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). Formerly he was a senior analyst for the United States
Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421. Email: cgfi@rica.net
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