Jim Diamond's recent opinion piece in the local newspaper ("
Climate change is the world's most pressing issue”) got the usual sort of online comments.
Plus some exciting fan mail.
To: Jim Diamond
From: Daniel W Nebert xxx@xxx.xxx
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 18:46:16 -0800
Dear James Diamond,
I found your recent 'Opinion' article in The Oregonian appalling and naïve. Also, I am disgusted and find it disgraceful that a college chemistry professor can "develop a course for nonscience majors"––in order to feed such Global Warming propaganda, purely of a political-agenda nature, and pretend that it's "science", to a bunch of young minds. A science teacher should be truthful about science and present only facts. However, I realize, and have seen (with my own six children), that political indoctination by teachers, from kindergarten through college, has been increasingly on the rise since ~1980.
My own career includes being author or coauthor of 640+ scientific publications to date, in which I've used The Scientific Method thousands of times. As a PhD in chemisty, you should learn about this method.
I've also learned sufficiently (from coursework and also from my late son) about the complexity of "Climate Cycles". As anyone knowledgeable in climatology, meteorology, paleontology and/or geology knows––numerous climate cycles have been taking place for hundreds of thousands of years. There are more than a dozen cycles that have been most thoroughly identified and characterized:
Glacial Cycles, approximately every 110,000 years, detected in ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica––going back more than 800,000 years.
North African Climate Cycles, occuring every 30,000 to 50,000 years, due to continuous slow changes in orientation of Earth's rotational axis.
Precession Cycles (every ~26,000 years), driven by tidal forces caused by the Sun and Moon. Earth is actually not perfectly spherical, so gravitational pull tugs the axis over time, creating "wobble" cycles.
North Atlantic climate fluctuations ("Bond events"), correlated perhaps with ~1,800-year Lunar Tidal Cycles.
Sixty-Year Climate Cycles. U.S. senior citizens today might recall that the 1930s-40s were warmer than the 1980s-90s.
Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillations, happening every ~50-70 years.
Interdecadal Pacific Oscillations (15-30 years), distinct from Pacific Decadal Oscillations (8-12 years).
Hale Cycles, representing sunspot activity, occurring every ~11 years.
El Niño Southern Oscillations (every 2-7 years) and the opposite La Niñas, typically lasting 9-12 months, but sometimes extending for years.
Quasi-Biennial Oscillations (~30 months)––along with Arctic Oscillations, North Atlantic Oscillations, and North Pacific Oscillations.
The natural causes contributing to these (more-than-a-dozen) listed climate cycles remain mostly obscure, but include: solar activity (frequency, strength of sun flares); geothermal vents and underwater volcanoes; cosmic ray flux; orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of Earth's orbit (together called "Milankovitch Cycles"); magnetic effects of the Sun and other planets; heat distribution between oceanic and atmospheric systems; and changes in "radiative forcing" (balance between solar radiation energy absorbed by Earth's surfaces and energy radiated back into space). Furthermore, Earth is closest in distance to the Sun in January and farthest in July, and there is a vast difference between land-water ratios between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
Natural climate cycles can of course be disrupted at any time by a massive volcanic eruption or meteorite impact. Within the next 100 years, Earth is predicted to enter into another 300-year period of cooling––similar to what happened between the "Medieval Warm Period" (950-1,250 A.D.) and "Little Ice Age" (1550-1850). Because cycles occur within cycles, one can see how naïve it is, to predict global temperatures with any certainty––even 10 or 20 years from now.
In fact, think of our local weathermen's forecasts; accuracy even three days in advance may differ by 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, last evening, the online prediction was that my community would have a temperature of 30 oF or less, from midnight through 8:00 am; turns out the temperatures did not fall below 35 oF in my yard! Yet, global warming alarmists can pretend to know changes in worldwide temperatures down to as little as 0.10 oF? That the Earth has remained in remarkable equilibrium, for many thousands of years, seems nothing short of a miracle.
Serious climate changes are well documented. The earliest Peruvian civilizations (4,000-1,800 BC)––populated with millions of people and preceding the Incan and Aztec empires––perished, in large part, because of severe droughts, many lasting several hundred years.
"Climate" is measured in centuries (with 30-year segments). Conversely, "weather" is described in days, weeks and months. If one compares the previous ten centuries with our most recent 100 years, there is no credible evidence for any detectable "man-made global warming"; despite all the media hype and political agenda––the natural cycles described above are scientific facts.
The reason for placing our global-temperature-sensing satellites into orbit in late 1977––is specifically to be on the lookout for future significant changes in worldwide temperatures, and so far no statistically significant changes in temperature have been recorded. For 30+ years, my late son spearheaded the metadata analysis of concomitant global temperatures recorded by these satellites for the U.S. Government. Although a staunch Democrat, he knew the difference between scientific FACT (measured data) and PREDICTIONS and OPINIONS (speculations derived from computer-modeling). He also felt that he could not "speak out" against government policy because of the Hatch Act.
In conclusion, the more one looks into the intricacies of Earth's extraordinarily complex climate system, the more apparent it is how little we really know.
Dan
UPDATE:
JD,
Sorry: I meant to
attach [not included - OG] this (Mar 15 2o15) article by Charles Anderson. [link added by OG]
Also,
please note this graph below [from a colleague of mine, who also sits
on the Nobel Prize Committee], showing that "correlation does not always
implicate
causation".
Please give this information to all your nonscience students and ask for their "opinions" as to "how CO2 is warming our planet".
DwN
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