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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?  

Page:   12

About the Author

Peter Ferrara is Senior Fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy, Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, and General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, now available from HarperCollins.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (6) | Leave a comment

Tony Wardle| 4.28.09 @ 6:10AM

So there's a global political conspiracy to promote global warming as a means of gaining power. If so, why wasn't the most powerful administration in history a party to it - that of the bumbling, grimacing, buffoon George W Bush? In fact he did everything he could to stall action on climate change. Blows a bit of a hole in your theory! What blows an even bigger hole is that there are over 1000 peer-reviewed scientific papers that show global warming is real and anthropogenic and there are none from the opposing perspective. Interestingly, the anti global warming brigade is almost entirely supported by free marketeers - the very people responsible for the current global economic collapse. Their economic polcies were disastrously wrong as is their so-called science.

ANTI TONY| 5.12.09 @ 1:38AM

TONY,
You are a sheep like the rest of your clueless cohorts. Here is a fact. The earth has not warmed for over a decade and in fact, global temps have remained largely flat until it began to decrease over the last ~18 months. So please take your verbose and pathetic argument back to the land of make believe from whence you came!

hgf| 12.2.09 @ 2:02AM

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John| 12.8.09 @ 6:16PM

So, here we are in December of 2009 and the headlines read that this decade will be the warmest on record. Is the truth truly discoverable?

Doowadiddy| 12.20.09 @ 8:47AM

"Anhropogenic" warming and CO2 "forcing" are 100% pure crappola, that's quickly becoming a certainty. But then unfortunately, for all the "neo-conservative" Gen-X twits, so are the brainless notions of some self a regulating free market, and the the religious right. So, only a fool picks one U.S. political party over the other in these times. They're both being driven by mass delusion, and they're both essentially full of $hit.

waterworldnot| 1.22.10 @ 12:09PM

I was happy going along with the whole GW thing. All those PHDs with their peer reviews telling me that CO2 was the enemy and WE are responsible for that increased CO2. Carbon Credits? Hang on. Where there's money to be made there is always a hidden agenda. So I spent a week reading everything I could find about CO2, Methane, Water Vapour,Rising temps, Sun spots, lunar pull, historical precedents, Ocean absorbtion, atmospheric CO2 saturation scales...and you know what...the final clincher, Al Gore is set to make billions from his investments in this new 'industry'. I am now convinced that whatever is making the world warmer, and there's plenty of doubt about that, it ain't CO2 and it ain't us. (Farting cows and sheep make as much sense).All the same, generating power from wind farms, solar, geo thermic etc seems a pretty smart idea so I'm all for that irrespective of GW. I am happy for the believers in GW to carry on believing, but personally, I'll sleep easy believing that we can pump unlimited amounts of CO2 into the air and it really isn't going to make more than a degree of temp increase....EVER. Good luck to you Al. Great scam. Good on you GW scientists. Top paying job for life and you will not be proved wrong in your life-time. Ho hum...life goes on. Now about the Millenium Bug...

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