And another thing about global warming . . .

I've been doing some more reading about global warming. The facts seem to challenge the hysteria of the warmists who think the sky is falling.

According to most people I read, there is no dispute regarding the fact that climate changes and does so for many reasons. In fact the past century has witnessed two distinct periods of warming and cooling. The first warming occurred between 1900 and 1945. Since CO₂ levels were relatively low then compared with now, and didn’t change much, they couldn’t have been the cause before 1950. Well, there goes the current theory, which blames the rise on carbon dioxide output, which is higher now than the period between 1900-1945.

The second warming shift began in 1975 and rose at quite a constant rate until 1998. Now here's something interesting about this finding: it is reported only by surface thermometers, not satellites, and is legitimately disputed by some.

This recent warming (up until a recent 17-year “pause”) is part of a pretty constant trend of temperature increases ever since the last “Little Ice Age” (not a true Ice Age), which ended in about 1850.

A Nature journal article titled “The Case of the Missing Heat” by Jeff  Tollefson reviews research on why “the warming stalled” in 1998. He reports “the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field.”Tollefson then claims that: “climate skeptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that the heat must be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere.” His conclusion is revealing: “Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their [climate] models.”

Other sharp climate scientists think that we shouldn't worry about global warming since we have a very different future ahead. For example,  Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov who heads Russia’s prestigious Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg predicts that: “after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11 years” (the 19th to occur in the past 7,500 years). Did you catch that? A cooling may be coming our way.

Abdussamatov and others primarily link their cooling predictions to a 100-year record low number of sunspots. Periods of reduced sunspot activity correlate with increased cloud-forming influences of cosmic rays. More clouds tend to make conditions cooler, while fewer often cause warming.  He points out that Earth has experienced such occurrences five times over the last 1,000 years, and that: “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.”

All I can say is "Wow." Let's be careful before we ruin our economy to fix something that may not need fixing.