It was New Year’s Eve so I decided to visit Ms. Henny-Penny,
founder and Recording Secretary of the Holy Order of the Sky Is
Falling. I wanted to wish her a happier new year than the one
just finished and to bring her the good news that the sky isn’t
actually falling. I found her sitting on her nest looking glum
Us: Happy New Year, Ms. H-P
Ms. H-P: What’s so happy about it? All
that talk in Copenhagen and no action. We’re all going to fry in
a few years and no one is doing anything about it.
Us: It looks as if we won’t fry, after
all. A new peer-reviewed study by a Canadian physicist says the
warming in the 20th century was caused by the interplay of cosmic
rays on chlorofluorocarbons in our atmosphere. And now that the
CFCs are gone, the temperature has gone down and there is likely
to be no warming for the next 50 years.
Ms. H-P: What’s the name of this
scientist?
Us: Dr. Qing-Bin
Lu.
Ms. H-P: Sounds Chinese
Us: It’s a Chinese name, but he’s
Canadian; a professor of physics and astronomy at the University
of Waterloo. His study was published in the online journal,
Physics Reports.
Ms. H-P: I wonder if he’s a Chinese spy.
After they backed out of a carbon emissions inspection regime at
Copenhagen, they may do anything to play down the danger of
carbon dioxide.
Us: Come now, Ms. H-P. When Prof. Qing
started he was studying the formation of the ozone hole, not
global warming. The data showed him that CFCs, which were once
widely used as refrigerants, conspired with cosmic rays to cause
both the ozone hole and warming. He said this finding was
“totally unexpected.”
He found that, while CO2 increased a great deal from 1850 to
1950, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, global
temperatures stayed constant or rose only 0.1 degree Celsius. He
says that CFCs, a greenhouse gas, declined around 2000 and that
surface temperature has also been dropping, despite the fact CO2
is continuing to grow.
Ms. H-P: Maybe so, but he’s only one
scientist. Why aren’t others supporting him?
Us: They are, when it comes to global
cooling.
Last September, at a UN conference in Geneva, Mojib Latif, a
leading climate modeler and a member of its Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, said in a speech that the Earth has been
cooling and will continue to do so for the next two decades or
more..
At Western Washington University, Professor Don Easterbrook has
been studying the close relationship between oceans and global
temperatures and says the planet experiences natural cycles of
warming and cooling. He says that the most important ocean cycle
is something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation; that in the
1980s and '90s it was in a warming cycle and so was the Earth.
Earlier, a global cooling cycle from 1940 to 1975 had some
scientists predicting an ice age. President Obama’s science
advisor, John Holdren, was one of them.
Prof. Easterbrook says that the warm mode of the PDO has now been
replaced by a cool one and “this virtually assures us of three
decades of global cooling.”
Ms. H-P: That makes me feel a little
better, but why are so many sciences pushing global warming, or
“climate change” as they now call it?
Us: Alas, science has become subject to
fads and politics like most everything else. This UN effort, with
gigantic conferences such as the one in Copenhagen, is driven by
bureaucrats whose main objective is to redistribute the wealth of
the industrialized nations to those that aren’t.
Ms. H-P: What about our Pontiff, Al
Gore?
Us: He’s never met an outlandish claim he
didn’t like, and he’s making a lot of money from promoting global
warming.
Ms. H-P: Oh. I think I’ll go lay an
egg.
Peter Hannaford is going to buy a new parka with thicker
insulation for this winter.
