The American Spectator

The Public Policy

Why the World Is Getting Warmer, Even Though It Is Getting Colder

By Peter Ferrara from the March 2009 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Polar Ice Caps and Sea Levels

A BASIC SCIENTIFIC FACT: water expands when it solidifies into ice. That means the melting of ice in the seas would reduce water volume and reduce sea levels. The North Pole’s Arctic ice cap is primarily over water. So if it melted completely, sea levels would decline, not rise.

However, the melting of ice and glaciers over land leads the resulting water to run into the oceans, producing increased sea levels. The South Pole’s Antarctic ice cap is primarily over land. But recent trends have been for the Antarctic ice cap to expand, while it is the Arctic ice cap over water that has been reported as receding due to slight melting. That slight Arctic melting was due to temporarily warm ocean currents. In the past couple of years, that slight melting has been reversed, and the Arctic ice cap has been restored to 1979 levels.

The melting of glaciers, which is still going on due to the end of the last ice age, and, therefore, not due to global warming, has caused sea levels to rise by roughly 400 feet over the last 18,000 years! That rise has been decelerating over the past 5,000 years, settling into a stable rate of increase over the last century of about 1.8 mm per year, regardless of global temperature fluctuations. That would result in a sea level rise over the next 100 years of less than 9 inches.

Man-Made Global Warming Proved Wrong

ALL SCIENTISTS AGRE that if man-made global warming is real, it would leave a fingerprint in the form of temperatures increasing with altitude in the tropical troposphere portion of the atmosphere up to a hotspot about 10 kilometers above the surface, reflecting the pattern of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Warming due to solar variations or other natural causes would not leave such a fingerprint pattern. Recently, higherquality temperature data from balloons and satellites now enables us to settle the man-made global warming debate definitively.

The data from weather balloons shows the opposite pattern: no increasing warming with altitude, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot. The satellite data shows the same result: no increasing temperature with altitude, no hotspot, no fingerprint, maybe again a slight cooling with altitude. Game over. QED. The global warming empire is rattling around but has not and cannot come up with an effective response. The data is the data. The science is the science. Man-made global warming is a hoax developed to serve powerful special interests.

Here Comes the Sun

STUDIES BY REAL scientists, not those trying to support a pre-determined political outcome, have been accumulating over the past 20 years showing an increasingly close correlation between, on the one hand, temperatures and climate on Earth, and, on the other, solar activity, such as solar cycle length, solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and sunspots. Indeed, some studies correlate these solar effects with temperature or climate variables on almost a year to year basis, providing a much better explanation for winding temperature changes in the 20th century than greenhouse gases. We are now experiencing an extended period of severely reduced sunspot activity, which in the past has been followed by rapid cooling, such as the Little Ice Age.

Imagine that: climate and temperatures on Earth are overwhelmingly determined by the sun. Who would’ve thunk it?  

Letter to the Editor