NASA Acknowledges 'Deep Solar Minimum'

It is true that most Americans no longer believe in Anthroprogenic (Man-made) Global Warming. Why? Mostly because of the harsh winter that we just endured and the unusually cool spring we are looking at right now. If greenhouse gas emissions are supposed to make temperatures go up, then why are temperatures going down? That is what people are asking.

But these observations may be showing us just the beginning of things to come. Most legitimate scientists (i.e. those scientists who are not on someone's political payroll) are coming to the conclusion that climate change, whether it be warming or cooling, is driven by our sun. NASA has recently lent it's support to that position by acknowledging the possibility of a "deep solar minimum."

What that means is that our sun has slipped into a period of decreased activity and decreased solar energy output.

From Science@NASA:

The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%). It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

And to show what that means graphically:



Sunspot counts are clearly at a minimum and that means decreased solar energy output as evidenced by the solar irradiance measurement:



NASA scientists admit that they do not know what will happen next. But it is clear that the sunspot cycle and the solar irradience cycle are more closely tied to global temperature change than any greenhouse gas emissions are. We know this because thanks to the efforts of China and India, greenhouse gas emissions have increased over the years, but global temperature has gone down, not up.

Other effects:

A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth. A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

Also, if those sunspots don't return and solar energy output does not increase, we will be in for some very cold times ahead.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Deep Solar Minimum
Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
April 1, 2009

Dr. James Hansen Admits The True Goal Of Global Warming Alarmists: Socialist Redistribution Of Wealth

They say there are two kinds of intelligence: Book smarts and Street smarts. Book smarts are good when you are trying to make a better living through self-improvment. Street smarts are essential when you want to live in the real world rather than some impossible-to-achieve fantasy world.

Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the perfect example of someone who has book smarts, but has almost no street smarts whatsoever.

As evidence, I present a letter that Dr. Hansen wrote to Barack Obama in which he tells Obama how to use the Global Warming Hoax as a means to implement a socialist policy of wealth redistribution.

This isn't a joke. He wants a "carbon tax" on petroleum products believeing that such will encourage Americans to "move beyond fossil fuels." Here are some excerpts from his letter:

The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry. The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels.

Any first year economics student will be able to tell you that the "appropriate effect" will be artificial price increases all across the board. In other words, anything that uses fossil fuels to get from the producer to the consumer will go up in price. Gas, oil, food, clothing, construction costs, infrastructure costs, public services costs, etc. Everyone will be paying higher prices.

How does Hansen think the public will respond?

The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts. No large bureaucracy is needed. A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money. A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend.

First, if Hansen honestly believes that Washington would enact any kind of tax without creating bureaucratic positions to oversee such a tax, then he really has no street smarts at all.

Second, why does it have a maximum share for two children? Is this Hansen's way of telling people how many children they are allowed to have? A way of implementing dictatorial population control?

Third, another thing that Hansen doesn't realize is that the ultimate effect of his proposal would be to subsidize the American people for paying higher fuel prices. In other words, force higher prices by enacting a tax, and then redistributing the tax proceeds so that people can turn around and pay the higher prices. There is no net gain there at all and nothing gets done. Money simply passes from one set of hands to the other and there is absolutely no productive result to show for the transfer.

And another point that shows how out of touch Hansen is with reality is that he actually makes the claim that paying higher fuel prices (and all other inflationary costs that result from such higher prices) would stimulate the economy!

Here is what he has to say about that:

A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective. It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead.

Yeah, let's look at that one for a minute. What would low and middle income people do when costs increase but their paychecks remain the same? They cut back. They cut back on food purchases. They cut back on anything that involves transporting the kids. They cut back on educational resources. They cut back on shopping. They cut back on their recreational activities. They cut back on whatever vacation trips they had planned. In short, they cut back on anything that is affected by the artificial price increase that this lunatic tax would cause.

Again, as any first year economics student will tell you, the net result of all these cut backs is to cause the economy to shrink, but Hansen has completely deluded himself into believing that it will cause the economy to grow!

I don't know of any rationally thinking person who would agree that any of this would be good for low and middle income people.

The Greenhouse Effect Theory and its Anthropogenic Global Warming fellow travelers have been shown to be hoaxes by legitimate scientists as we see average global temperatures drop and record snowfalls thorughout the world. Now we know why the hoax is being perpetuated. Socialists like James Hansen are trying to convince socialists like Barack Obama to use the hoax as a power play for themselves and further wreck our economies as well as the dreams of low and middle income Americans.

This carbon tax is easily one of the most idiotic fantasies ever to be floated in political circles.

Also, proposals like this are a prime example of why Michael Crichton was so firm in his commitment to keeping politics and science completely separate.

You can access the original letter on-line here:

Hansen's Insane Proposal Published At Columbia University
Dr. James Hansen

And here is another blog entry regarding James Hansen's crackpot claims:

Dr. James Hansen Gets It Wrong Again
84rules
November 17, 2008

Dr. James Hansen Gets It Wrong Again

Word is slowly getting out about the hoax of man-made global warming. As more legitimate and accurate scientific data gets out to the masses, the global alarmists are resorting to more and more propaganda, half-truths and sometimes outright lies.

Dr. James Hansen is one of those alarmists and his theories are is such a state of decline now that he is pushing bad data to shore up his ever failing reputation.

Christopher Booker at the London Telegraph has this story.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So, what happened? Why did Dr. Hansen decree it to be the warmest October on record? Because he used bad data. In fact, he recycled old data to make his measurements. He used Russian data from September and inserted it into October.

More:

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

Hmmm. Obviously, the IPCC is more interested in the politics of global warming than they are in the legitimate science.

This isn't the first time Dr. Hansen has had his claims debunked. His famous "hockey stick" model was shown to be a fraud in 2007 when it was discovered that the satellites taking the temperature readings were improperly calibrated. When the temperatures were adjusted for the proper calibration, it turns out that the hottest years on record were in the 1930's, not the 1990's.

If fact, the National Oceanographic and Atmospherics Administration (NOAA) did a better job of getting good data. Note the following map showing that temperature change across the United States was mostly "normal" or showed a cooling trend so far in 2008:



You can access the complete article on-line here:

The World Has Never Seen Such Freezing Heat
Christopher Booker
The London Telegraph
November 16, 2008

And more information on this issue here:

James Hansen's Boldest Lie To Date
Hennessy's View
November 10, 2008

Watts Up With That

Climate Audit

Global Warming Lies Create A Climate Of Crisis

So, now that Al Gore has won a Nobel Prize for his work based on junk science, what will furture generations think of us when they look back and see how all of the Al Gore types ran around like Chicken Little and they were honored for it?

Alan Caruba asks that question and a few others in his latest column dealing with Global Warming. Here is an excerpt:

The United Nations conference in Bali, attended by some 10,000 participants and observers, is likely to make future generations conclude that ours was deranged to be discussing how humans could have any affect whatever on the climate. They will, in retrospect, agree that the global warming theory was a lie whose agenda was to retard anything that might extend and enhance life on earth. The Protocol is based entirely on a lie that predicts dramatic and imminent global warming. Global warmers insist that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced, but carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. Climatologists will tell you that any rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not precede, but follows warming cycles.

That's right. How many GW alarmists have ever allowed anyone to even mention the Medieval Warming Period when global temperatures were even warmer than they are today?

[Note: Global Warming alarmists tried to discredit the Midieval Warming Period based on a November 2006 report from the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration, but that report itself was debunked when NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies revamped their temperature measurements in August of 2007.]

However, Caruba goes on and addresses the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on regional economies:

A November 30 Bloomberg News article by Kristian Rix and Mathew Carr reported that Japan, Spain, and Italy face as much as $33 billion in fines as the result of having agreed to reduce so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions and failed. These three nations are deemed the “worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change.” Among the nations exempt from the Kyoto Protocol are China and India, both of whom represent two of the six billion people on planet Earth. The idea that limits on carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved without their participation is idiotic. ... Consider now how many schools, hospitals, bridges, roads, and other benefits to their citizens that $33 billion represents to Japan, Spain, and Italy. Such fines will be transferred to the coffers of the United Nations for having failed to curb CO2 emissions that are actually a benefit to the Earth! An entirely bogus system of “carbon credits” has been created to transfer huge amounts of money from industrialized nations accused of producing too much CO2 to those nations that, for lack of development—failed economies—will garner funding as they “sell” their excess credits. The same system would allow various industries to sell the same worthless credits to those—primarily producers and users of energy—deemed to be major CO2 “polluters.” Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen prey to the lie that CO2 represents a form of “pollution” and should be regulated, the known science renders this decision an egregious juridical error The Earth, over billions of years, has gone through cycles of warming and cooling that are well established. It has gone through periods when the CO2 content in the atmosphere was far higher than today. The latest cooling period is called the mini-ice age and lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Earth has been warming naturally since then. There is no dramatic warming occurring. Predictions of this are based on totally flawed computer models, none of which can begin to approximate the sheer chaos and complexity of the Earth’s weather system.

And a very important question, as Caruba asks, is: What would that $33 billion in fines have meant to the people of the nations being forced to pay them? Further, what exactly is the United Nations going to do with it? (This scheme conjures up memories of the Iraqi Oil-For-Food Scandal that made so many UN bureaucrats rich at the expense of Iraqi children.)

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Global Warming Lies Create A Climate Of Crisis
Alan Caruba
Canada Free Press
December 10, 2007