In thinking about it, global warming is a topic that can be divided for human purposes into long-term changes and short-term issues. In the long term there are three factors affecting cyclic change: eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the Earth’s axis and orientation to the sun. The first factor describes the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun, the second describes variation of the Earth’s axis from the orbital plane and the third describes orientation of Earth’s rotational axis.

Using these three orbital variables, a Serbian mathematician named Milutin Milankovitch formulated a model in 1930 calculating Earth’s long-term surface temperature changes. The model works and accurately predicts and tracks climate warming and cooling trends over centuries. You can read a synopsis of it all here.

Then along comes agenda-driven politicians who know little of climate science but find support from “rent-seeker” scientists. A movement, really afoot since the 1960s, has now created the secular science of global warming that has threatened world political stability and economic health in the past two decades.

The Kyoto Protocol, predicted to reappear in the next Congress as national policy under an Obama initiative, is government control of greenhouse-gas emissions. It is especially egregious to America and her industry because it imposes great costs without producing benefits for reducing the national carbon footprint. Developing nations are exempt from the treaty, and one such nation, China, surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions in June 2007.

The U.S. houses a large contingency of social activists seeking to redistribute wealth among poorer nations reported to be most affected by global warming and are therefore most deserving of “corrective social justice.” Whether this approach to control greenhouse-gas emissions or carbon footprint is the Kyoto treaty or takes the form of “cap and trade” regulations, the result is the same. Both approaches spell economic disaster for America and produce no benefits for the world. A paper on this, “Global Warming and Social Justice,” published in the spring of 2008 by University of Chicago law professors Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein, is a weak but useful discussion.

Now we come to the media shenanigans part of this subject – what you did not hear on the news. On July 22, Dr. Roy Spencer testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and what he described is very significant in the context being described here. Dr. Spencer has a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin and was a NASA employee for many years before resigning in 2001 to become a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama. However, he retains his role as U.S. Science Team Leader for NASA’s Aqua satellite, which is dedicated to weather data measurement.

During the Clinton Administration, Dr. Spencer said he was told what to say and what not to say about global warming in his frequent Congressional briefings. He at first bit his tongue and later resigned when appropriate because of this stifling of what he believed to be the truth, coerced by Vice President Al Gore. In his recent testimony he said, “The climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” which “is mostly natural and is largely out of our control.” Without getting wrapped around the axle here, the IPCC and most other models neglect natural cloud variabilities that force radiative flux. Radiative flux is highly correlated to the temperature changes that cause them and is host to internally generated radiative forcings, which are (in the models) uncorrelated to the temperature variations that result from them. Got it?

Satellite data from 2000-2005 confirms that misinterpretation of cloud behavior in the IPCC model assures no “cause and effect” relationship for global warming that is due to human activity. By the way, since the media and Congress want to ensure difficulty in locating Dr. Spencer’s testimony, you can read it here.

There is an upward trend of 0.7°C over the last 100 years, with no increase over the last seven. Also, 70% of the century’s warming is attributable to El Nino/La Nina, and mankind’s role is relatively minor. Note that the IPCC has been silent about this work, so we can suppose that the scientists are observing Dr. Spencer’s admonition that, “Good news should be celebrated, not attacked and maligned.” IH