"Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years" -A Contrary Point of View

A week after the Harvard Crimson published a shocking editorial chiding Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Stanford University held a luncheon entitled "Is Global Warming a Myth?"

To erase any doubts about our position on global warming, The Daily Galaxy believes that common sense dictates that human technological civilization has impacted natural climatic cycles.

The Stanford guest speaker was the world-renowned global warming skeptic S. Frederick Singer, a former space scientist and government scientific administrator.

Singer, who holds PhD in Physics from Princeton University, was a Special adviser to President Eisenhower on space developments, a professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and co-author of  Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

In this New York Times bestseller, authors Singer and co-author Avery present the compelling concept that global temperatures have been rising mostly or entirely because of a natural cycle. Using historic data from two millennia of recorded history combined with natural physical records, they argue that the 1,500 year natural sunspot magnetic waves cycle that has always controlled the earth's climate remains the driving force in the current warming trend. Man created carbon dioxide has very little effect on the earth's climate.

Since the 1,500 year cycle was discovered in the early 1980's it's general characteristics have been confirmed by measurements in: tree rings (living, preserved and fossilized), pollen, coral, glaciers, boreholes, stalagmites, tree lines, and sea sediments. The most recent cycles have been recorded in human history with forced migrations, starvation, and disease during the cold portion of the cycle and greater population, expanded farm land, greater crop variety, and extra building during the warm portion.

The causes of the 1,500 year cycle are not well understood although 600 of them have been identified in the last million years. This permits the authors to be relatively confident that we have been moving into the warm phase of the cycle for the last 150 years. It also suggests that we may have one or two degrees more warming if we are to get to the typical high of the warm phase.

Although the warm phase of the cycle has been typically more regular than the cold phase, it does not move steadily to a peak and then fall off, but rather moves abruptly higher at the start of the warm phase followed by highly irregular (but modestly higher) temperatures for hundreds of years.

Singer explained that the recent warming the Earth has experienced is not dangerous and is not something humans could alter. Global warming activists such as Al Gore, Singer believes, are hyping the problem. He said that such activists have not come close to demonstrating that human-generated greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming.

If politicians truly wanted to make a change to affect energy use, Singer told the Stanford audience, they would have to increase taxes on gasoline, which would decrease use of vehicles. He believes that such taxes would hit people of low income the hardest.

Singer claimed that many businesses, such as the wind farm industry, are making money off the global warming hype. Singer said that it is essential to convince the proponents of global warming that what they are doing is counterproductive and will not make any difference to the climate.

Let's get Singer and Al Gore to an Oxford Union debate...We suspect it would be a "Ross Perot moment" all over again.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

Creator of the Gaia Theory: Status of "Spaceship Earth"
The Great Debate: How Fast Will Sea Levels Rise?
The Andes Vanishing Glaciers
The Day the Seas Died: What Can the Greatest of All Extinction Events Teach Us About Climate Change?
The Timeline For 21st Century “Climate Change Events”
Coming of Age in the Holocene
"Snowball Earth" Challenged
Bigger Threat than Global Warming -Mass Species Extinction
A "Flat World" Solution to Climate Change
Monitoring Climate Change -Experts Say We Need Lunar Observatories
Unraveling the Mysteries of -Clues to Climate Change on Earth?
Arctic Discovery –Ancient Connections & the Global Climate
Stephen Hawking: Climate Change Greatest Threat Facing Planet
Arctic’s Legendary Northwest Passage is Ice-Free for the First Time in Recorded History
Coming War for the Arctic?

Story Link:

Stanford Uni serves global warming myth

Comments

[Michael Kopp]

Galaxy's staff believes "common sense dictates" that we did it. Uh-huh. Well, now I know why I think your science writing is so sloppy (aside from your generally poor command of English and your abysmal proofreading). It's because you don't understand science itself. Science is riddled with "common sense dictates" errors. Science is counter-intuitive: what seems to be the inescapable explanation is often diametrically opposite to the one which ultimately wins out through evidence-based science. We are being devoured by believers in a common sense that is guilt-ridden about humanity and ignorant of science's true method. And "science" media like yours, and New Scientist, and Cosmos, et al (not to mention the mainstream media) are helping us destroy ourselves instead of actually doing something about the world's problems. Shame.

[Aurelijus]

Well said Michael.
I must admit my attraction to this blog although I really don't apreciate authors being partial as in this particular case.

Gentlemen: Please note that unlike most mainstream publications, we are publishing both viewpoints. Also, please note that all publications, the venerable New York Times included make copy editing errors. But our apologies for those that escape the "net." As for our abysmal English, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My best, Casey.

[J W]

This guy sounds like a quack. He has strong associations with oil companies. He has also apparently worked with Phillip-Morris trying to prove that secondhand smoke isn't bad for you...

He was also wrong about the Kuwait fires which had lasting climate effects.

He claims to have not accepted money from these same companies for consultation... Yeah right, this guy is a liar and wrong most of the time. In the pocket of Big Oil and Tobacco.

[Leila]

Dear Sirs and Madams:

In his introduction to the Second Edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand said, “We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.”

I do not believe that we live at the level of early cave-dwellers, or even at the level of medieval townspeople, in regards to our impact on the Earth. We have gotten very good at moving, shifting, changing, transmuting immense amounts of stuff. When a tanker spills oil, the local bay ecology is changed (please see currently: San Francisco, U.S.A., ongoing local story.) When our mid-west power plants spew toxins into the atmosphere, European forests suffer damage.

I don’t want to live in, or leave to my sons, a planet that has been pretty much stripped and submerged, because we didn’t want to confront our corporate overlords. The big ecology movement among young people in the 1980’s and 1990’s was very good. Students were looking at rainforests and marine life.

The whole “No Child Left Behind “idea was that corporate executives didn’t want 10th graders looking into what they were doing to the planet-the planet they would inherit. It’s been “busy work” for everybody since that passed. No. Really. No one in the top of the corporate field liked students really looking into what corporations do. They might learn something. It was imperative that they be given a whole lot of required work, in another direction, to occupy their time.

You know, the magicians' trick to draw your attention elsewhere?

Leila-a teacher

[B.B.]

Michael Kopp, your rude comments were a bit unnecessary. I didn't read anywhere in the article that Daily Galaxy beleives that humans alone are responsible for all climate change, or that "we did it". It sensibly stated that, "common sense dictates that human technological civilization has impacted natural climatic cycles". I think it's pretty obvious that human civilization has at least some small impact on the environment and no where in the article did it state exactly how much humans are contributing, because no one knows for sure. But personally, I agree with JW that Singer is a quack. It's pure idiocy to think that it's impossible for humans to impact the environment including climate. We're in the middle of a mass extinction period driven by pollution, habitat destruction and climate change. Daily Galaxy has an environmentally friendly edge to it, but they're not afraid to give both sides of an argument. That's something I respect. I think people like Michael need to pull their heads out of their butts and stop worrying about punctuation, and start looking at the big picture instead.

[Jim V.]

I must give credit to The Daily Galaxy for printing views that it doesn’t necessarily agree with. However, I personally think Mr. Singer has put his finger on the exact reason for global warming. We flatter our selves to think that we (mankind) should have such an impact upon the earth's climate. I know his is currently the politically incorrect viewpoint, but are we to ignore history's record of this phenomenon? "Six hundred of" (these cycles) "have been identified in the last million years." Surely that counts for something. Is this debate driven by science or politics? No one has yet proven that we have caused global warming.

I read several months ago an article on how NASA scientists have discovered that the mean temperature of both Mars and Uranus have also been found to be on the rise and now they want to take a look at the other planets as well. How will Mr. Gore blame that on America and the rest of the industrialized world?

Lastly, I will agree that it is still a good idea to find cleaner energy sources for reasons other than our supposed affect upon the climate. But I will point out that if you ever want to stop the use of petroleum based fuels to run things, then you will have to make it so that the oil companies become the ones to supply us with the hydrogen to burn in our cars. As long as the profits stay there, then maybe we’ll see some progress. The conversion to hydrogen combustion is easy, cheap and clean and could have been done decades ago. It's not that finding an alternative is any great technological challenge for us. Consider this: Having basically no space program in 1961, we put men on the moon in just 8 years. So doesn't is seem odd that in the 35 years since the Arab oil embargo of 1972 (when everyone was hysterically calling for alternatives), we still haven't figured out what else to run our cars on. It's not about difficult technology; it's about overcoming political clout. And that's often what holds back a lot of good science isn't it?