STARpod.org

Futurist John L. Petersen Looks Into Earth Changes

There are very good reasons to believe there are direct correlations between the general state of the sun and our climate and between the specific sunspot and coronal discharges and our weather.

By JOHN L. PETERSEN

Futurist, The Arlington Institute

johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
 

01/21/2012 04:23 AM CST

(The Arlington Institute)  -- In the last issue of FUTUREdition I made mention of Mitch Battros' book, Solar Rain which, published in 2005, made note of significant shortcomings in the collection of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) data which underpins almost all of the notions that most people and governments have about climate change. That common perspective is that the earth is getting warmer and that human activity is an important contributing factor to that escalation. It's known as AGW, anthropomorphic global warming. Essentially all national initiatives and policies related to reducing CO2 and carbon trading and sequestration are based upon IPCC data and pronouncements.

Battros said, (remember, this is five years ago), quoting from an article in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters:

Every time I have mentioned the possible problem with this data and the implications that have been drawn from it I have received communications from well-meaning friends and FUTUREdition readers imploring me to be more "balanced" in dealing with the subject. Some folks have cancelled their subscription to this newsletter because I raised these issues, suggesting that I was a "denier" of the obvious indications that the world was warming and that if we all didn't do something about it -- fast -- that humanity itself was threatened. 

Well, now it turns out that all of those allegations (and even more data manipulations) were quite true and even worse, some "threats" -- like the supposed fact that Himalayan glaciers would all be melted by about 2030 putting at risk the lives of billions of downstream Asians -- were just made up -- in order to generate funding for the author's (and many other scientists') projects. 

Please read this article from the IMVA Medical News which reports that "Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the "Climategate" affair, conceded that there has been no "statistically significant" rise in temperatures since 1995. 

"Jones, the former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia, admitted to the BBC in February of 2010 not only the statistics but stated that from January 2002 to the present, the earth has been cooling and that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from 800 to 1300 A.D., did in fact exist; a scientifically accepted fact that Jones and other climate researchers tried to discount or hide." 

But the glaciers are melting, you say. Yes, there are some places that are warmer than they have been and some glaciers are indeed melting, but there are also many major places that are significantly colder (read the article at the link) and other glaciers that are rapidly expanding. On the average, the global temperature has not changed. 

What's also interesting about this piece is that it echoes Mitch Battros's notion that this climate shift is being greatly influenced by the sun.

"Climate is changing much faster, stronger and sooner than anyone expected and it is changing in unexpected ways. It is supposed to be warming but the reality is actually cooling. Sami K. Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research announced that he believes the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century. He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years. Solanki holds that a repeat of the Dalton Minimum is most likely, and that the earth is in for an unusually deep and long solar minimum. The sun is cycling through its own solar minimum phase and naturally when things calm down in terms of solar radiation, things tend to cool, not warm." 

Good friends have sent me this video, which purports to debunk the "deniers". It features many indications of weather (not climate) and says that this indicates that the planet is warming. Weather, by definition, is short-term, and one or two months of warmer (or colder) weather can never be an accurate indication of what the global climate is doing. Look at the significant disparity in the underlying data points in the graphs that are shown. One scientist talks about his global climatic model that he implies predicts what the global weather is likely to be in 90 years (at the end of the century). Do you really believe that we have computer models that can predict what the climate might be almost a century from now? Since our models certainly didn't anticipate the unusual weather that we are experiencing now, it takes a significant amount of hubris to believe that we understand what the climate might be that many decades from now. 

I think it is vitally important to contextualize all of this: