Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 years by Dr. Fred Singer and Dennis T Avery is the definitive book of skepticism toward the mainstream consensus that human activity is causing global temperatures to rise and that this is bad, aka anthropogenic alarmist global warming. This book came out conveniently the same year as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Dr. Fred Singer is/was a professor at the George Mason University of Virginia and Dennis Avery is a fellow at the right leaning Hudson Institute. Neither are climatologists exactly, but Singer is an atmospheric physicist and Avery is an expert in food/agriculture policy which concern the climate however indirectly.

This book should be valuable to even those who take the consensus prima facie. The "90-something percent of scientists agree" line trotted about in favor of anthropogenic global warming makes it seem the only skeptical academics are a crazed political minority. But if you really look at those studies, you'll find the 90-something percent figure is of the papers which take a position on climate change which most don't, as if most climate researchers spend their time on that one question. A 2014 analysis by Steven Hayward of the 97% number, published by John Cook of the University of Queensland, found that 66.4% of abstracts of the 11,000 sampled took no position on anthropogenic global warming, 32.6% endorsed AGW, .07% rejected AGW, and .03% were uncertain. The skeptics are still the minority, but the consensus isn't that overwhelming. What could be going is a paradigm as described by Thomas Kuhn. Researchers in a field just assume the paradigm to be true and do research under the assumptions until contravening research piles up, and it is very costly to an individual to go against the consensus publicly. Those who do may receive money from the fossil fuel industry without their knowledge which would make their work paradoxically seem even more suspicious. It also seems to be right-wing public figures that challenge global warming aren't in academia, but then again conservative or libertarian types don't trust academia and do work for think tanks and institutes like Cato or the Heartland Institute.

Singer and Avery are the best of the climate skeptics one is likely to come across. They don't deny that there has been a recent trend towards warming, but only that human carbon emissions via the greenhouse effect of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are to blame. Rather the warming climate is a result of the activity of the sun and Earth's orbit around it over thousands of years. They also dispute that warmer climate is was or will be detrimental to human flourishing. 

The book is compact and their case relatively easy to follow. It is generally accepted that the Earth does go through natural cycles which do affect its climate. Ice ages occur roughly every 100,000 years due to the irregular orbit of the Earth around the sun, called the Milankovitch cycle. At different points in the orbit the planet gets farther from the sun and tilt of the planet changes resulting in varying amounts of energy from the sun. In between the ice ages are briefer interglacials lasting around 15-20,000 years, the current interglacial period we're in has been about 12,000 years. The warming of the Earth since 1880 however is too fast to be due to this cycle however which suggests something else is at work.

Singer and Avery present a different cycle to operate in between the great ice ages. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle proposes that the Earth has gone through 1,500 year (plus or minus 500 years) cycles of cooling and warming. The data for this cycle came from an analysis of oxygen isotopes from ice cores in Greenland which provided 250,000 years of data. The researchers compared the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to the lighter oxygen-16 isotopes and found a 1,500 year climate cycle of alternate warming and cooling occurring since the last major ice age 11,000 years ago. The data doesn't go back before the last ice age, but the cycle could have occurred during other interglacials. There isn't a straight 1,500 year solar cycle to account for this but there is the 87 year Gleissberg cycle and the 210 year DeVries-Suess cycle which when superimposed (7 of the 210 year cycles or 17 of the 87 year cycles) fit into a 1,470 year cycle. The Gleissberg and DeVries-Suess cycles have to do with the amount of sunspots which signals greater solar activity and so more warming. 

"The sun constantly releases a stream of charged particles-the solar wind-which partially shields the earth from cosmic rays. This solar wind varies with the sun's irradiance. When the suns activity is weak and the solar wind blows less forcefully, more cosmic rays streak through our atmosphere, creating more low clouds that, in turn, increase the earths ability to reflect more of the suns visible range heat away from the planet. That has a cooling affect.

"When the sun is stronger, as it had been recently, the solar wind blows more strongly, and the earth is shielded more effectively from cosmic rays. That means fewer low clouds and more warming. 

"The rays are thought to collide with particles or molecules in the atmosphere, leaving them electrically charged, or 'ionized.' These ionized particles then seed the growth of cloud water droplets...clouds that form low in the sky are relatively warm and made up of tiny water droplets. These tend to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. High clouds are cooler, consisting mostly of ice particles, and they can have the opposite effect...they argue that the imprint of the solar magnetic field in the solar wind has increased over the past century. So the shielding from cosmic rays will have increased, decreasing the formation and cooking influence of low clouds, and providing a possible contribution to the observed global warming."

Got it? Singer and Avery make a much easier explanation than it sounds. 

I've seen other arguments that solar activity is driving current climate change, but they have to do directly with the effect of the sun on Earth, and it is disputed whether there has been more solar activity since the 18th century closing of the little ice age and I've seen critics of the solar explanation claim that there has been less solar activity the last 35 years while temperatures have risen. Singer & Avery make a somewhat different argument. Solar activity affects the amount of cosmic rays that enter the Earth to create more clouds which reflect sunlight into space, reducing warming. Their argument still relies on a link between a relationship between recent solar activity and warming though with a different mechanism. 

The cycle they argue can be seen during the Roman warming period 200BC to 900AD through the medieval warming period 900AD to 1300AD, which is 1500 years. From 1300 to 1850 is the little ice age and from 1850 to the 20th century is a warming trend. From 1940 to 1975 is a small cooling trend, due to pollutants blocking out the sun, and the modern warming trend which started the public concern over global warming was from 1975 to 1998, the El Niño event. Even though there could very well be such a cycle of warming and cooling, I'm not so sure that this discounts the greenhouse effect of carbon and that recent warming fits into this cycle. If the Roman to Medieval warming was a 1,500 year cycle, shouldn't the cooling after 1350 have gone on past the nineteenth century? 500 years of cooling and then warming suggests that something happened to interrupt the cycle. The cooling stops and warming starts as the Industrial Age puts more carbon into the atmosphere. It's too early however to discern a 1,500 year cycle since the Middle Ages, so short term solar activity is the likely explanation.

Many if not most skeptics deny that there has been warming since 1998 or the later twentieth century. A pause in rising temperatures they say occurred after the El Niño warming event 18 years ago, so that there are people graduating high school who have never lived through global warming (very funny). The disagreement is due to whether surface or satellite data is used, the latter that John Christy and Roy Spencer claim indicates less warming. Reconstructing climate patterns from tree rings, ice cores, the atmosphere is harder than those who blindly take the consensus AGW view realize.

Singer and Avery discount the greenhouse effect as being responsible for current climate change because of the existence of these natural cycles. The scary predictions of hotter temperatures assume that the effect of co2 will be amplified by more vapor in the atmosphere. Warming will increase the moisture in the atmosphere from warmer oceans, but more moist and warm air could increase rainfall and leave the upper atmosphere at least as dry as previously. Warmer oceans could also mean more snow and ice on Greenland and the Antarctic which would eventually make sea levels fall. 

Singer and Avery don't think that warming is detrimental to human flourishing either. During the Medieval warming period Vikings established a colony in Greenland and wine was grown up in Britain! The industrial revolution and the economic progress it has brought mankind has occurred with the end of the little ice age and rising temperatures. Of course romantic anti-industrial leftists take this to the opposite conclusion, that industrial activity is warming the Earth and is nature's punishment for capitalism and economic growth. Anti-capitalist author Naomi Klein recently wrote a book This Changes Everything which argues that combating climate change will require the end of free market capitalism to be replaced by a world socialist order. Things haven't been looking up for socialism since 1989 so climate change is becoming the far left's raison d'être. 

Singer and Avery make two claims commonly made by consensus skeptics to support the claim that the AGW consensus is political. First that the 1995 IPCC report by the United Nations was altered to remove skeptical passages about human contribution to climate. The alterations were made to chapter 8 which was about the causes of global warming. The chapter was based on lead author Ben Santer's two research papers neither of which had been peer reviewed when the report was published. Santer altered the report to support human activity as the cause of global warming. I haven't seen any good rebuttals to this, and alarmists like to say that the very possibility of catastrophic warming justifies such exaggeration.

The second claim is that Michael Mann's graph depicting a sudden and large increase in global temperatures along with greater carbon in the atmosphere is a fraud. The graph appeared in the 2001 IPCC report using tree ring data from 1000 to 1980. The tree ring data makes the medieval warming temperatures lower than contemporary ones. Data after 1960 used thermometer measurements grafted onto the tree ring data. Known infamously as the hockey stick, Steven McIntyre and McKitrick accused Mann in 2003 of falsifying data. Even though it appears there were flaws in his work, other reconstructions show the hockey stick pattern. The problem may be with the data itself. Tree growth isn't just determined by temperature and is most reliable short term, but not reliable enough for Mann to use for recent temperature apparently. The 2010 Climategate emails it is claimed revealed a deliberate effort to "hide the decline" after 1960 with this tacked on data. Mann has actually sued National Review author Mark Steyn for accusing him of fraud, as well as comparison to child molester Jerry Sandusky. At this point the data becomes very political.

The book is convincing, which means the reader should do their own research. I myself think global warming has been occurring and human activity has something to do with it, but I don't think it's as great or as bad as the alarmists make it to be. That would make me a skeptic, but not a denier. Liberals would claim that the mission of the skeptics is to induce doubt, not necessarily denial, so as to forestall necessary actions costly to the interests behind such skepticism. But I find that I learn a lot more by reading books like this critical of climate science, like reconstructing/modeling climate trends. I am reminded of the Confucian proverb: if something is popular examine it, if something is unpopular examine it.

I think long term the greater threat is global cooling; another ice age. The last interglacial period, the Eemian 120,000 years ago, was much warmer than even current temperatures so long run climate change is determined by natural cycles. The Eemian period also had higher CO2 levels, yet an ice age still followed. In maybe a few thousand years or even sooner another ice age is bound to occur as it has before. Interglacials don't last as long, so it's something to be concerned about. Humans have done very well since the end of the Pleistocene. The earliest civilizations don't go back much further than 10,000 years, which is not long after the end of the last ice age. The industrial revolution occurred after the more recent little ice age. Carbon dioxide seems more of a nutrient than a pollutant for us. Even if we continue to burn remaining fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect is as strong as we're led to believe, we'll eventually run out in a few centuries and the climate will resume its natural course. Maybe we should start preparing.