Energy Probe

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
November 10, 2007

The alignment of the planets, and especially that of Jupiter and Saturn, control the climate on Earth.

So explained Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, a giant in science over much of the last century whose accomplishments are perhaps unsurpassed for their breadth, depth, and volume. This one man authored or co-authored 100 scientific books and more than 1,000 scientific papers, he edited the Benchmarks in Geology series (more than 90 volumes in print) and was general editor of the Encyclopaedias of the Earth Sciences. He edited eight major encyclopedias of specialized scientific papers in the atmospheric sciences and astrogeology; geomorphology; geochemistry and the earth sciences; geology, sedimentology, paleontology, oceanography and, not least, climatology.

Changes in sunspots and other solar activity, scientists have realized for more than two centuries, correlate closely with the climate of Earth, explaining the ice ages and periods of great warming. But what, Dr. Fairbridge wondered, causes these changes in our sun?

The answer, he discovered with the help of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lies largely in the solar system’s centre of gravity. At times, the sun is at the solar system’s centre of gravity. Most often, this is not the case– the orbit of the planets will align planets to one side or another of the sun. Jupiter, the planet with by far the largest mass, most influences the solar system’s centre of gravity. When Uranus, Neptune and especially Saturn — the next largest planet — join Jupiter on one side of the solar system, the solar system’s centre of gravity shifts well beyond the sun.

The sun’s own orbit, he found, has eight characteristic patterns, all determined by Jupiter’s position relative to Saturn, with the other planets playing much lesser roles. Some of these eight have orderly orbits, smooth and near-circular. During such orbits, solar activity is high and Earth heats up. Some of the eight orbits are chaotic, taking a loop-the-loop path. These orbits correspond to quiet times for the sun, and cool periods on Earth. Every 179 years or so, the sun embarks on a new cycle of orbits. One of the cooler periods in recent centuries was the Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when the Thames River in London froze over each winter. The next cool period, if the pattern holds, began in 1996, with the effects to be felt starting in 2010. Some predict three decades of severe cold.

Temperatures on Earth are but one consequence of these periodic and predictable celestial movements. Others, Dr. Fairbridge has shown, are seen everywhere on Earth: in the various and differing periodicities in rocks, glaciers, sand dunes and the circulation of the ocean; geomagnetic records; the records of the isotopes of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in tree rings, ice cores, air and water. They are the periodicities of climate change.

Dr. Fairbridge’s best-known periodicity, which he developed in the 1950s, hypothesized that sea levels had been rising for the last 16,000 years, during which there were periodic oscillations of rise and fall. The Fairbridge curve describing this period — so named in derision because it offended the conventional wisdom – is now widely accepted. It demonstrates that, even within the past 1,000 years, sea levels have several times changed by up to two metres, and suddenly — each of these large changes occurred in fewer than 40 years.

Dr. Fairbridge’s broader climate change claims — that celestial changes control Earth’s temperatures — remain controversial, but less so than they were decades ago, when his was a relatively lone voice. Solar scientists with increasing regularity are publishing data establishing celestial origins to climate change on Earth. Dr. Fairbridge saw his Fairbridgecurve theories vindicated, but he won’t his celestial claims. This most remarkable individual died a year ago this week, at age 92. – Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute. www.urban-renaissance.org

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CV OF A DENIER

Rhodes Fairbridge, an early expert on climate change, was a professor of geology at Columbia. He received an undergraduate degree from Queen’s University in Ontario and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford. He was awarded a doctorate of science by the University of Western Australia in 1944 at the age of 30, bypassing the usual PhD prerequisite. During the Second World War, Dr. Fairbridge also served with the Royal Australian Air Force in U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters as deputy director of intelligence.

Larry Solomon
Financial Post
November 7, 2007

‘Big Thaw,’ a summertime spectacular in National Geographic magazine, provided awesome scenes of climate-change catastrophes.

The glaciers are melting. The ice sheets are melting. They’re sliding rapidly out to sea. More rapidly than anyone imagined. Look for the ice sheets to collapse. Look for sea levels to rise. Etc. Etc.

National Geographic’s breathless account, brilliantly illustrated with the stunning photography for which it is famous, won headlines around the world. It has been dramatized and magnified on nightly newscasts and blogs alike, and has become a staple in the popular imagination.

But it won’t happen, says Prof. Cliff Ollier of the University of Western Australia. “Rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is impossible.”

The National Geographic descriptions, on their face, seem plausible. “Ice seems rock hard when you crunch an ice cube or slip on a frozen puddle. But when piled in a great mass, ice oozes like slow, cold taffy,” the article explained. “On Greenland, it flows outward from the heart of the ice sheet, a dome of ice the size of the Gulf of Mexico … Four miles [six kilometres] wide and several thousand feet thick, Jakobshavn is an icy Amazon, disgorging more ice than any other Greenland glacier.”

The article described fast-flowing glaciers such as Greenland’s Jakobshavn. “In the past decade it doubled its speed, to roughly 120 feet [37 meters] a day. By now it discharges 11 cubic miles [45 cubic kilometres] of ice each year, jamming the fjord with fresh icebergs. As a result, Greenland lost 54 cubic miles of ice in 2005, more than twice as much as 10 years ago–“and more than some scientists were prepared to believe.”

More alarmingly, the article reports that Greenland’s ice sheet is starting to stir — satellites have detected a weakening of Greenland’s gravity –and that the same stirring may be occurring in Antarctica. The article describes a thinning Antarctic ice plain “of dead-flat ice” that in the next decade will be thin enough to float free.

“Once that happens and the ocean intrudes, a chain reaction of collapse could follow,” the National Geographic article continues. “The bed is very deep and flat for the next 150 miles inland, so an enormous fjord would be created in the ice … That would put the nail in the coffin — it would go on accelerating, retreating, and drain a lot of that part of West Antarctica.”

All this, Prof. Ollier explains, is nonsense. The scenarios raised in the National Geographic article stem from models divorced from the real world. They rely on imaginary glaciers and ice sheets — not on the actual formations that exist in Greenland and Antarctica — and demonstrate no understanding of how glaciers flow.

As one example, the models rely “on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming,” Prof. Ollier explains. “In reality, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane.”

Ice sheets, which can extend to a depth of several kilometres below the surface, can melt at their base — the warmest part of the ice sheet, due to the heat of the Earth. The drilling of ice cores, revealing complete records of depositions over periods of hundreds of thousands of years, show that the ice sheets have accumulated without melting, even when temperatures have been warmer than now.

“Ice sheets do not melt from the surface down — only at the edges,” Prof. Ollier explains. The modellers’ mechanism that has “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers.”

In truth, the rate of ice flow now seen in the polar regions does not depend on the present climate, but on the accumulation of ice that occurred in the distant past. Neither is today’s warming extraordinary: “Arctic explorers used to get their ships a lot closer to northern Green-land than you could now,” he explains.

The records “do not fit the model of surface melting, even infrequently. After three-quarters of a million years of documented continuous accumulation, how can we believe that right now the world’s ice sheets are collapsing!” ‘The Big Thaw’ is a Big Saw.

— – Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute. www.urban-renaissance.org

CV OF A DENIER:

Dr. Cliff Ollier, a geologist, geomorphologist and soil scientist, is emeritus professor and honorary research fellow, University of Western Australia. He has authored or co-authored more than 500 publications, mostly in world-class journals, and 10 books, including the widely acclaimed Tectonics and Landforms and The Origin of Mountains. He received his doctorate from Bristol University.

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
October 26, 2007

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.

But Dr. Gray isn’t an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray’s mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.

“The whole process is a swindle,” he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

” The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 1992 defined ‘climate change’ as changes in climate caused by human interference with atmospheric composition,” he explains. “The task of the IPCC, therefore, has been to accumulate evidence to support this belief that all changes in the climate are caused by human interference with the atmosphere. Studies of natural climate change have largely been used to claim that these are negligible compared with ‘climate change.’ ”

Dr. Gray is one of the 2,000 to 2,500 top scientists from around the world whom the IPCC often cites as forming the basis of its findings. No one has been a more faithful reviewer than Dr. Gray over the years — he has been an IPCC expert almost from the start, and perhaps its most prolific contributor, logging almost 1,900 comments on the IPCC’s final draft of its most recent report alone.

But Dr. Gray, who knows as much about the IPCC’s review processes as anyone, has been troubled by what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigour in the IPCC’s review process.

“Right from the beginning, I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.

“Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC, I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organization from the very beginning.”

Dr. Gray has detailed extensively the areas in which global warming science falls down. One example that this New Zealander provides comes from his region of the globe: “We are told that the sea level is rising and will soon swamp all of our cities. Everybody knows that the Pacific island of Tuvalu is sinking. Al Gore told us that the inhabitants are invading New Zealand because of it.

“Around 1990 it became obvious that the local tide-gauge did not agree — there was no evidence of ‘sinking.’ So scientists at Flinders University, Adelaide, were asked to check whether this was true. They set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands, including Tuvalu, confident that they would show that all of them are sinking.

“Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose.”

Other expert reviewers at the IPCC, and scientists elsewhere around the globe, share Dr. Gray’s alarm at the conduct of the IPCC. An effort by academics is now underway to reform this UN organization, and have it follow established scientific norms. Dr. Gray was asked to endorse this reform effort, but he refused, saying: “The IPCC is fundamentally corrupt. The only ‘reform’ I could envisage would be its abolition.”

— – Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.

www.urban-renaissance.org

CV OF A DENIER:

Vincent Gray is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, with a PhD in physical chemistry. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and authored the book, The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of ‘Climate Change 2001.’

Dr. Gray has participated in all of the science reviews of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2006 was a visiting scholar at the Beijing Climate Center.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 11, 2007

Should children become tools of propagandists, their schools able to serve as indoctrination centres that teach students to parrot the views of the powers-that-be rather than think for themselves?

In the UK, where school standards are arguably more stringent than in North America and such abuses proscribed by law, one determined parent took the education system to task over Al Gore’s climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, which was widely distributed through the schools. Last week, the verdict came in. In an interim decision, the British High Court ruled that such partisan works cannot be presented in schools without identifying them for what they are. Teachers who mislead their pupils into thinking that Gore’s film accurately represents the science of global warming are in violation of the “Political indoctrination” section of the country’s Education Act of 1996, which explicitly requires that “The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid … the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school.”

The UK school system is not alone in distributing An Inconvenient Truth widely. In Canada, Australia, Spain and many parts of the U.S., this film has been formally and informally incorporated into school curricula by teachers and school administrators intent on fostering the conventional wisdom on global warming. In the U.K., the Labour government’s push to promote a political global warming agenda came from two government ministries, the Department of Education and Skills and the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, which distributed Gore’s film to all 3,385 secondary schools in England.

As the government’s education secretary stated in a February press release announcing the distribution, “influencing the opinions of children is crucial to developing a long-term view on the environment among the public. Children are the key to changing society’s long-term attitudes to the environment. Not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families’ lifestyles and behaviour.” The environment minister, meanwhile, discouraged any questioning by young minds: “The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of the report by the IPCC [the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change],” he stated.

Such explicit government admissions of an intent to indoctrinate children with material that they were encouraged to unquestioningly accept, and to exploit children to in turn sway their families, doubtless influenced the High Court judge in making his determination. To limit further damage to children during the time required to formally write his decision, he instructed the government to mend its ways at once.

For the film to be lawfully shown in school, the court ruled, government must issue Guidance Notes to Teachers that describe the film as a political work that promotes only one side of the argument. The court further ruled that the government must advise teachers who present the film without making its political nature plain that they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act and guilty of political indoctrination. Eleven inaccuracies needed to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The 11 inaccuracies that the court found are not quibbles. They represent the film’s most spectacular claims about the dangers of global warming, and form the very basis of the film. Were the film to be edited to have these inaccuracies removed, in fact, vanishingly little would be left.

1. The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro demonstrate global warming. The government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
2. The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 caused temperature increases over 650,000 years. The court found that the film was misleading: Over that period, the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
3. The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina, which it suggests was caused by global warming. The government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
4. The film attributes the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
5. The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing Arctic ice. It turned out that Gore had misread the study: In fact, four polar bears drowned because of a particularly violent storm.
6. The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, throwing Europe into an ice age. The claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
7. The film blames global warming for species losses, including coral reef bleaching. The government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
8. The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt, causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
9. The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting. The evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
10. The film suggests that sea levels could rise by seven metres, causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact, the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years, and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
11. The film claims that rising sea levels have caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The government was unable to substantiate this claim and the court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

The judge’s final decision is expected within the week. It promises to change how and what students are taught, and to empower teachers and students alike who choose to think for themselves. In classrooms in Canada and elsewhere around the world, meantime, our children are not empowered to question the conventional wisdom on climate change, and teachers continue to show An Inconvenient Truth without any guidance to the children in their charge.

Sources,

• Read a transcript of the initial court proceedings from the British High Administrative Court of Justice
• Read the testimony of Professor Robert Merlin Carter of Australia’s James Cook University
• Read the testimony of Christopher Walter Monckton, former education policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher
• Read more on the inaccuracies of in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 8, 2007

To save the planet from global warming − a looming catastrophe many believe we can no longer prevent − could require that China stop building the equivalent of a new 1000 megawatt coal plant every five days, and India the same equivalent every two weeks. It could also require that the rest of the developing world slows its economic growth, for the good of humanity. And it could require us, in the rich countries, to dramatically curtail our air and auto travel, and other greenhouse gas producing activities, even if it means plunging ourselves into recession if not depression.

Or, stopping global warming could require sailing a fleet of 50 globe-cooling yachts on the high seas. To Stephen Salter, emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh and the inventor of the cool yachts, there is but one credible course to take, and informed scientists know it. Earlier this week at a climate debate sponsored by the Royal Meteorological Society, “I asked for a show of hands about whether official proposals for CO2 reductions could do enough to stop global warming in time,” he explained. “Not one of 300 people with professional interest in the field raised a hand.”

In contrast to the utter futility of attempting to quickly refashion the global economy into a carbon-lean machine, Prof. Salter’s machine provides realistic hope. Low-level stratocumulus clouds blanket about one-quarter of the world’s ocean surface, cooling the waters below by reflecting the sun’s rays back into space. Brightening those clouds with sea salt to increase their reflectivity by a mere 3%, atmospheric scientists calculate, would provide sufficient additional cooling to counteract the warming effect caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere. The sea salt would be delivered via fine sprays of ocean waters from Prof. Salter’s yachts.

The amount of salt water required to cool the planet is surprisingly small − 50 ships, each pumping salt water at the rate of 10 kilograms per second to produce tiny droplets, could suffice. The tiny droplets evaporate to leave salt residues, which are then distributed by the winds to seed the clouds. In an attempt to waste not a droplet, the yachts − unmanned and controlled by satellite − would continually roam the oceans, positioning themselves where cloud conditions were optimal and the need for cooling was greatest.

The scheme seems fanciful and implausible, but not to many scientists immersed in the climate change field. Eminent scientist John Latham at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, who first proposed cloud-seeding to cool the planet in a 1990 Nature article, is Prof. Salter’s enthusiastic collaborator in the venture. Scientists at NASA, Brookhaven, the U.K.’s Royal Meteorological Society and other prominent agencies likewise see promise in the cloud-seeding concept. It is Prof. Salter’s own track record, however, that dispels any notion that the cool yachts are more fantasy than fantastic.

He is known as one of Scotland’s greatest inventors, and as the father of modern wave energy technology, which is now being introduced in countries throughout Europe. His digital hydraulics may revolutionize windmills and automobiles. Among his many other presciences, in 1968 he invented the touch computer screen. The wind-powered yacht with its odd rotor sails is not his, however, and is also not new. This 1920s invention, by Germany’s Anton Flettner, was an unusually stable commercial ship that crossed the Atlantic, out-sailing normal schooners under moderate to heavy winds.

Prof. Salter’s cool yachts do have one major design flaw: They promise to save the planet for a pittance, and without making humans pay a dear price for their profligate ways. Fifty ships a year, built at a cost of some $400-million to $500-million, would remove the increased warming now attributed to all the fossil fuel burning. They would also provide the time required for an orderly transition to economies based on renewable fuels − the passion of Prof. Salter’s professional life.

For reasons that would be unfathomable to many, environmentalists at Greenpeace and elsewhere have emerged as critics of the cool yachts, dismissing them out of hand as wacky inventions “that in all likelihood would come to nothing” and saying: “We’re looking for reductions in the use of fossil fuels rather than these technologies.”

A more important critic, because it holds the purse strings, is the U.K. Environment Ministry, responsible for abating global warming. It has been doing its best to trim Prof. Salter’s sails. The technology that Prof. Salter proposes is not yet soundly proven, it says, refusing to provide the $5-million in funds required to soundly prove it. The technology could lead to increased rainfall over the oceans, it says, without saying why this poses a problem comparable to that of global warming. The EU has committed to carbon trading as a means of countering global warming, it says, without acknowledging that carbon trading has failed to slow the increase in carbon dioxide. Marine animals could be affected by the technology, it says, as if the consequences of global warming would not affect them. An environmental assessment of the effects of spraying salt water into the air is required, it says, while dismissing Prof. Salter’s detailed proposal for conducting one.

The public might not like the yachts, the Environment Ministry also says, when it really fears that the public might like them too much.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.

CV OF A DENIER

Prof. Stephen Salter, emeritus professor of engineering design at the School of Engineering and Electronics at the University of Edinburgh, is “one of the finest engineers that Scotland has produced,” according to Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister. Prof. Salter is an authority on energy matters in general and renewable energy in particular. He is best known for his pioneering work to harness wave energy, which he begun in the 1970s in response to the OPEC oil crisis. His invention, Salter’s Duck, is the machine against which all others are measured. In small-scale controlled tests, the Duck can stop 90% of wave motion and can convert 90% of that to electricity. Cambridge-trained, Prof. Salter is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the inventor of numerous technologies, and the author or co-author of numerous papers.