Science: Time to Freeze AB 32

JAN. 31, 2012

By CHRISS STREET

California’s wildly expensive AB 32, Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, is supposed to prevent man-made global warming. AB 32 took effect Jan. 1 — just in time for it to suffer another devastating scientific blow. Temperature data from 30,000 worldwide measuring stations analyzed by the United Kingdom‘s Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit confirmd that the rising temperature trend in world temperatures ended in 1997 and the world may be facing a mini-ice-age.

The new research follows a commentary I published four months ago in the Big Government blog, “Nature Journal Discredits Global Warming.”  The article reported on the Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, publishing of the “definitive study” by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, rebuking anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming and attributing temperature variances to the effects of cosmic rays from the sun.

When my article appeared, conservatives gushed with praise.

But liberals, including the New York Times and Media Matters, threated to ruin me as a fraud for stating that one study could undermine the “proven science of man-made global warming.”  The controversy has continued to rage on the internet as a current search of Google generates 5,230,000 results and a search of Bing generates 12,600,000 results.  In spite of the powerful CERN study, on October 20, 2011, the California Air Resources Board voted to quickly implement the provisions of AB 32 as the first and only comprehensive limit on greenhouse gases in the United States.

Following release of the new Met and University of East Anglia data, leading climate scientists told The Daily Mail of London over the weekend that after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading toward a “grand minimum” in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

11-Year Cycles

The Mail quoted an analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface. The analysis suggested that solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.  These sunspots are generated from a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun, referred to as the Great Conveyor Belt.  It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit.  Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle.  That is why a circulation slowdown impacts climate predictions.

Recent weather station measurements of cooler temperatures are consistent with the current peaking of “Solar Cycle 24,” which is running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.  Solar Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, is predicted to be a great deal weaker still.

Dropping Temperatures

According to the Meteorological Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830, when average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2 degrees Centigrade (-3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology commented that water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans “have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate.”

When oceans cooled from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled.  When the Pacific cycle warmed after 1970, the climate warmed.  But the ocean “flipped” back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years.  In 2011, world temperatures fell by more than half a degree, as the cold water “La Nina” effect re-emerged in the South Pacific.

The result was widespread outbreaks of bitter cold and frequent snow storms, both across the United States and Europe.  Said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, “We’re now well into the second decade of the pause.  If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk.  And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.”

As my article stated in September, “After 20 years of academic supremacy and hundreds of billions of dollars of costs, the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory seems headed for the dust bin of history.”  As the preponderance of science continues to turn against man-made global warning, it is now time for Californians to turn against AB 32.

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