U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) has observed that for over 100 years, “journalists have quoted scientists predicting the destruction of civilization by … either runaway heat or a new Ice Age.”
Predictions, however, are easy to make, because so few remember the ones that didn’t pan out: rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and other such catastrophes, all supposedly anthropogenic (caused by human activity).
The latest blow dealt to anthropogenic climate change is a new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting at Llandudno, North Wales by Professor Valentina Zharkova, who holds a BSc/MSc n Applied Mathematics and Astronomy and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. According to Zharkova, it is now anticipated that between 2020 and 2030, solar cycles could cancel each other out, leading to a repeat of what is known as the Maunder Minimum. The period of the Maunder Minimum, between 1646 and 1715, was a time of unusually low temperatures in England, when the Thames River actually froze over. During these years many of Americans’ ancestors left England for the colonies to escape the chilling conditions.
Zharkova’s thesis is based on a model that draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the sun: one close to the surface, and one deep within its convection zone. She expects that solar activity will fall 60 percent during the 2030s, because the two waves will, in her words, “exactly mirror each other, peaking at the same time, but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun.”
She explained that the results will cause a period of much cooler temperatures. “Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity.” But, when they are out of phase, “we have solar minimums.” And, when there is full separation, “we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder Minimum, 370 years ago.”
Some scientists speculate that the dense wood used in the magnificent violins created by Antonio Stradivari, who was born one year before the Maunder Minimum, was caused by slow tree growth during that especially cold period.
The model used by Zharkova and her colleagues was created by a technique known as principal component analysis, using the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California.
Extrapolating on the results of this new study, it becomes evident once again that human activity plays, at most, an insignificant role in global climate change, and is not a main driver of climate change. Almost all alternate global warming and cooling is caused by the activities of the sun. This should be no surprise, when one notes the Medieval Warm Period during the Middle Ages, when the Vikings settled Greenland and farmed in places that are now sheets of ice. This unusually warm period was followed by the exceptionally cold temperatures of the Little Ice Age. It is a fact, too, that though CO2 has risen steadily over the past 8,000 years (and apparently jumped during the past 500 years), the Earth has generally cooled during that time, interspersed with a couple of warm periods that caused melting glaciers, such as the Medieval Warm period.
Despite the clear historical and scientific evidence against human activity causing any noteworthy changes in the world’s climate, environmental alarmists such as Al Gore continue to insist that the “debate is over,” and that it is a scientific fact that climate change is anthropogenic — and must be curtailed.
It will be remembered that in 2009, Gore incredibly predicted that “the entire north polar ice cap” would disappear during the summer months “within the next five to seven years.”
Why would Gore insist on such frightening scenarios? He summed up his radical environmentalist agenda in his book Earth in the Balance. “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.”
If one makes the rescue of the environment the “central organizing principle for civilization,” then it can be concluded that he deems what our Founders saw as the actual purpose for government — the protection of life, liberty, and property — as secondary at best.
Gore is advocating increased government control over every aspect of human activity — in essence, it is a call for world government.
But, if the scientific evidence does not support global climate change caused by human activity, why do these alarmists persist in their advocacy of draconian regulations that will drastically reduce both our standard of living and our freedom? Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth let the cat out of the bag several years ago when he declared, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (For more on environmental plans and fallacies, see “How to Protect Our Environment.”)
