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Monday, September 23, 2019

It's Sad To Watch Children Being Used

Greta Thunberg was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.  That's great for Greta, but sad for the world.

For those who don't know, Greta is the Swedish teen who is busy launching strikes by school children to combat global warming and other impending climate disasters.  But here's the problem:  as of today, there is still no empirical evidence that there truly is any global warming due to the activities of humans.

The theory is that higher levels of carbon dioxide and other gases are acting to promote a greenhouse effect which raises global temperatures. 

And what do we actually know?  Here are the facts, not the theories:

1.  Two thousand years ago, during the days of the Roman Empire, the world was warmer than it is today.  Obviously, this is based upon scattered data, since there was no systematic weather observation in those day.  There seems to be no major objection, however, to the conclusion that based upon available data, Earth was warmer at that time.

2.  One thousand years ago, when the Vikings were plundering their way across
Western and Northern Europe, Earth was warmer than it is today.  Again, this is based upon sparse data, but some things cannot be argued.  For example, during these years, there were many vineyards in modern day Sweden and Norway.  There were permanent farming settlements in Greenland.  There were also other farms and other settlement in regions which today are just too cold to allow agriculture.

3.  About 600 years ago, the Earth cooled and we entered a mini-Ice Age.  This was the time when the plague spread across Europe.  There was starvation and disaster as the weather got colder and crops frequently failed.  All those vineyards in Scandanavia and settlements in Greenland and elsewhere across Northern Europe were abandoned.

4.  The cooler weather remained in place until the start of the 19th century.  Interestingly enough, this cooler weather on Earth corresponded to a period of lower sunspot activity on the Sun.

5.  Starting around 1815, the climate started to warm back up.  This warming had nothing to do with any greenhouse effect or anything that people did.  It is agreed by even the most strident global warming supporter that until some time after World War II, there was not enough carbon (or other) emissions to affect the climate.

6.  During the period from 1900 to 1940, the warming observed was about the same as happened during 1960 to 2010.  The first period was not man-made. 

7.  Between 20 and 30 years ago, Congress funded measurement devices to get supremely accurate temperature data for Earth's atmosphere and its surface.  The satellite system that measured the atmospheric temperatures found no warming trend whatsoever between 2000 and 2017 (the period for which the data has been released.)  The surface measurements from the special system set up in the USA found that between 2005 (when the measurements started) until 2018, ther was no warming trend at all.  This is limited to just the USA, but that is a pretty big chunk of the Earth.

8.  The global warming movement is based upon computer generated models that predict a warming trend.  Those models failed to predict the climate accurately for the period after 2000.  The failure was statistically significant.  In other words, the actual data showed that the computer models are wrong.

So what does all this mean?  Simply put, the climate has varied over time since long before there were any carbon emissions by humans.  In just the last 2000 years, the climate has cooled and then warmed on a global scale.  There is no data that supports the theory that any current warming is different from the variations seen during the last 2000 years.  In fact, the theories that the global warming supporters use on which to base their arguments that emissions from human activity is causing warming have been disproven by the data.

Instead of redoubling the efforts to learn what, if anything, is affecting Earth's climate, the global warming enthusiasts are trying to use children to pressure people with fear of impending doom.  They should (and probably do) know better.  It is just appalling, however, to think that an entire generation of children is being terrorized by something that doesn't seem to be happening.

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