It has been nearly three decades since the topic
of global warming, and then climate change came on the scene as a hot
(pardon the pun) topic on the pages and screens of our news media. Most
people have taken sides as to whether or not humanity plays a role in
determining the temperature of our planet.
Whichever side you choose, it may not matter because
the majority of the people will make the final decision. This decision
making majority is not into the climate change debate for personal
gains, political power, or social rewards. It is out of a genuine
concern to do the right thing for humanity, their children, and all life
on earth. Yet many are ambivalent, confused about the science or lack
thereof to support one opinion or the other confidently. I believe that
most are concerned with the least important factors rather than the most
accurate answers.
Let’s first establish that climate change is most
definitely real. We all know that in the past, there were ice ages and
wooly mammoths. We know about the heat of the dust bowl years of the
1930s pictured in the famous movie The Grapes of Wrath. Here I plan to
give you the major vital factors that cause the climate to change. I
choose to divide the controlling factors into four groups, leaving last
those issues with which the reader is likely most familiar.
The first group is related to the planetary orbit of
the earth around the sun. The closer the earth is to the sun, the warmer
it will be on earth. We learned in grade school that the earth is 93
million miles away, orbiting around it once a year. But this orbit is
not always the same but is always
changing. At times, the orbit is almost perfectly round; then, over
thousands of years, it elongates and looks like a stretched out pancake,
which we call an ellipse. Figure 1. About every 100,000 years, the sun
makes a complete shift from this maximum elliptical shape when the earth
goes as much as 120 million miles away to a near-perfect round shape.
Then the earth is only 83 million miles away and it starts all over
again, back to elliptical.
This changing distance between the earth and the sun
makes a big difference, which results in a change in our climate.
Picture yourself at a campfire sitting 9 feet from the fire and then
moving to a place 7 feet from the fire. That is the same ratio the earth
experiences moving between 83 million miles and 120 million miles.
The second factor that figures in the climate change
story is the tilt of the earth relative to the sun. Presently this tilt
is 23.7 degrees shown in Figure 2, but again things are always changing.
The northern hemisphere of the earth will slowly tilt more towards the
sun then slowly starts tilting back away from the sun. But after 40,000
years, it will be back to the tilt we see today. Within those 40,000
years, the tilt can range between 24.5 and 22.7 degrees. The tilt is
significant as it determines winter, spring, summer, and fall and what
their temperature ranges are likely to be.
The
third group of factors that impact the earth is contained within the
sun itself. The sun undergoes very complicated and powerful magnetic
cycles from high activity to low activity. It is easy to tell the
difference from here on earth. When the activity is high, we see lots of
spots on the sun. When we see few or even none, we know the activity
levels are low, as can be solar radiation.
Scientists have been carefully counting these spots
for hundreds of years since Galileo got his first telescope. With
satellites and advanced telescopes, NASA gets a count every day and also
measures how big or small they are. As we see in Figure 3, scientists
discovered without a question that these events go up and down in clear
11 year cycles.
Believe it our not astronomers have recorded 24 such
cycles in the past 250 years. Presently we are at the end of a cycle
with near-zero sunspots. NASA has confirmed in recent years that
increasing sunspots are linked to increases in earth temperature as well
as the other planets, like Mars and Saturn, and even the moons.
Essentially, none of the factors in these three
groups are seriously considered in the alarmist views. They tell us that
we are the primary forces controlling earth temperatures by the burning
of fossil fuels and releasing their carbon dioxide. I hope my readers
can recognize the absurdity of their claims.
Now to the final group 4, the factors that logically
and recognizably play a role in climate change. It is these variables
that climate modelers try to use to create equations that supposedly
tell us about how our climate will change for the coming decades. These
factors are easy to understand but mostly impossible to predict. They
include such things as the impact of clouds, the role of sea ice and
glaciers, hurricanes and tornadoes, vegetation, the balance between the
earth’s water, water vapor and ice, as well as the energy, flows between
the oceans, the land, and the air.
With these tools and methods, we can predict the
weather for the next few days, maybe even weeks away. Surely they can’t
predict the weather a year away, let alone decades into the future.
I hope this short tutorial on
the big climate change picture will make you more skeptical. After all,
that’s the first responsibility of all real scientists, run experiments,
gather data put together a theory then have as many experts try to
shoot it down as best they can. The output of computer models is not
data. Instead, these models are used to justify the nonsense they try to
tell us that; life on earth will end in a dozen or so years along with
their other ridiculous predictions for the future.
Note: Portions of this article were excerpted from the 2020 book A HITCHHIKERS JOURNEY THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE with
permission of the author Terigi Ciccone. The book is the best possible
source for parents and grandparents to explain reality to their
children.
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