Truth Revolution

Our mission is simple: To vigorously seek the truth from the garbage heap of lies, ignorance, bigoted bias and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. We will provide a new venue for disseminating hard news, insightful, fact based analysis of the harsh realities often ignored or distorted by mainstream media.

Although I studied journalism, I found very quickly that most journalist work very hard on their stories but their editors would put some totally irrelevant spin on the story to push their own agendas demanded by their masters. So anything important was lost! We in today's society have allowed a few disgusting lying money grovelling grubs take over the worlds media heavily supported by Wall street money men, who could'nt 'lie' straight in bed! With the morals and integrity of a mangy alley cat.

They are truly dragging all of us down a very dangerous road to an unspeakable abyss!

The truth slowly emerges. It's really about the US dollar

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

Oil fields in the Iraqi province of Basra. Iraq produces about 2.5 million barrels of oil per day.

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

The Reach of War

(June 19, 2008)

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets. Russia and Kazakhstan have forced the major companies to renegotiate contracts.

The Iraqi government’s stated goal in inviting back the major companies is to increase oil production by half a million barrels per day by attracting modern technology and expertise to oil fields now desperately short of both. The revenue would be used for reconstruction, although the Iraqi government has had trouble spending the oil revenues it now has, in part because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

For the American government, increasing output in Iraq, as elsewhere, serves the foreign policy goal of increasing oil production globally to alleviate the exceptionally tight supply that is a cause of soaring prices.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry, through a spokesman, said the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.

It said the companies had been chosen because they had been advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts, and because these companies had the needed technology.

A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. “We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,” said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. “The contents of the proposal are confidential.”

“The bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold” in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.

Among some of the many urgent and relevant issues today is the soaring price of fuel. There is absolutely no justification for the price of petrol at the pumps! Fuel still cost exactly the same to refine today as it did in the 70's, 80's and 90's. It's what the media are implying when they ram down our throats hundreds of times a day, "the price of oil per barrel today folks is at record highs". Absolute garbage! Oil companies pay around $10.00 a barrel for their oil and sometimes less. What the deceitful media are telling you is the daily "hedge fund futures market" price, or the daily spot price and has nothing to do with what oil companies pay.

How the IMF props up the bankrupt U.S. dollar system

One of the crucial pillars of support for today's Dollar System is Washington's control of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF. The way this actually works is carefully disguised, behind a facade of technocrats and economic theory of free market ideology. In reality, the IMF is a modern era collection agency for the Dollar Empire. It collects its tribute, through major international banks, which use the dollars to further extend the power of American financial and corporate hegemony, in effect the driving motor of what is globalisation.
Ironically, though the IMF is a main prop of the Dollar System, it's nominally headed by a European, today a German, Horst Koehler, and before him, by a Frenchman, Michel Camdessus. The real power is carefully concealed behind the facade. Under the constitution of the IMF, no major decision is possible without 85% support of the board of directors. The United States, which drafted the original IMF charter at Bretton Woods New Hampshire in 1944, made sure it had the decisive veto control with an 18% vote share. That veto remains to today. Insiders know well that the IMF is run by Washington. It is no accident that its headquarters is also there.
The IMF was originally created in the 1944 Bretton Woods New Hampshire international monetary conference, called by President Roosevelt to set up a post-war monetary and trade system. It was intended as a fund to support stability of currencies and trade of the post-war European allied countries. At that time Washington held the vast bulk of world gold reserves and expected to lend dollars to rebuild Europe. The original IMF idea was to pool a share of reserves of member states, which any single state could then borrow, in event of a short-term payments crisis, to stabilize their currency. Ten years after the Great Depression, the major industrial nations, including the USA, were concerned with creation of a stable, growing Europe, not least as an export market for US products. The first member to borrow was Great Britain after the war. The last European state was Italy in 1977.

The IMF is retooled in 1980s

Since 1977, no European or G7 country has gone to the IMF to borrow. Instead they have borrowed from private banks or issued state debt. They know all too well how destructive the IMF conditions are. By the end of the 1970s some people were suggesting the IMF had outlived its role, much as some argue with NATO after the end of the Cold War. Washington had other ideas for the IMF however.
The role of the IMF changed dramatically in the early 1980s, under US pressure. Instead of serving as a stabilizing fund for industrial countries of Europe or Japan, the IMF became the decisive agency controlling economic policy of underdeveloped countries. What evolved since the first Latin American debt crises of the early 1980s was an entirely new role for the IMF to act as policeman to collect dollar loans for private New York and international banks. The IMF became the driving motor for what came to be called "globalisation."
After the first oil price rise of 400% in the 1970s, many developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, or most of Africa, borrowed heavily to finance needed oil imports, or trade deficits. They borrowed dollars from major international banks operating in the London Eurodollar market. London was the centre for, in effect, the recycling of the large sums of petrodollars from Arab OPEC countries to US and other major banks.
The major banks took the new oil dollars and immediately relent them at a nice profit, to countries like Argentina or Egypt. Before the 1970s Argentina had been a fast-growing economy developing modern industry, agriculture and a rising standard of living for its people. It had almost no foreign debt. Ten years later, the country was under control of the IMF and foreign banks. The US changed the rules, in the process creating the debt crisis.
In October 1979, a dramatic shock occurred for the debtor countries. Overnight their cheap dollar loans cost them 300% more interest charge. Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US, unilaterally changed US interest policy to force the dollar higher against other currencies. The effect was to raise US interest rates 300% and rates in the London bank market by even more. The bank loans to Argentina and other countries had been made in "floating" rate agreements. If the key international rate in the London bank market, LIBOR, was low, Argentina would pay a low rate on its dollar loans. But when it suddenly rose 300% in 1979-1980, many countries suddenly faced a payments crisis.
It took until 1982 for the crisis to reach default level. At that point, Washington demanded the IMF be brought in to police a debt collection process on developing debtor nations. This came to be called the Third World Debt Crisis. The impression was created that countries like Argentina were guilty for mismanagement. In reality, whatever political corruption may have existed in the debtor countries, the corruption of the IMF system and the petrodollar recycling was far greater. The Volcker interest rate shock completed the package of destruction of living standards on behalf of dollar debts.
How did the IMF act in the third world debt crisis? Here is where it becomes clear that the role of the IMF was to support the dollar hegemony of the United States, and not to help poor countries get through a temporary debt problem.

The 'Washington Consensus'

The IMF has been described by some as a tool of neo-colonialism. That is too mild, as 19th Century British or European colonialism, however harsh, never managed to accomplish the extent of devastation and destruction of health and living standards the IMF has done since the 1970s.
The IMF operates as a supranational agency to take control over helpless debtor states, to impose economic policies that force the country ever deeper into debt, while opening the market to foreign, often US capital and global corporate exploitation. The fact that debtor countries never get out of their dollar debt, only deeper in, is deliberate. IMF policy in fact insures this. The dollar debt is a major prop of the dollar system and of private international banks. When that debt is repaid, banks lose power and credit contracts. So long as debt grows, bank credit can grow, the paradox of modern banking.
The tip-off that the real purpose of the IMF is quite different from its public claims, is that despite repeated proof of the destructiveness of its policies, called "conditionalities," the IMF has never changed the method it uses in a target country. There is a reason for that.

Take Argentina as a case in point. In early 2002 Argentina defaulted on repaying $141 billion in foreign dollar debt. One of the most devastating economic collapses in modern history ensued. The IMF was crucial. In early 2000 Argentina had turned to the IMF for emergency credit to prevent a collapse of its currency, then fixed to the strong US dollar. As the dollar rose, Argentina found its exports trade collapsing. The country went into recession. The IMF stepped in with a $48 billion "rescue" package. But there were conditions.
First the government had to agree to severe IMF-dictated cuts in government spending before it would get any money. State subsidies on food for low income were ended, triggering food riots. Interest rates exploded in a vain effort to convince foreign banks and bondholders to not sell. That only worsened the economic depression. State companies were forced to privatise to raise money and "promote free market" liberalization. The Buenos Aires water system was sold for pennies to Enron, as was a pipeline going from Argentina to Chile.

Washington insisted all the while that Argentina hold to its fixed currency value, arguing that the trust of foreign bondholders and creditors was the priority. Meanwhile the country sank into its worst depression in memory, as millions lost jobs, and bank accounts were in the final stage frozen, so ordinary citizens could not even draw savings for life necessities.
What exactly does the IMF do when it comes into a crisis country that asks for emergency lending to overcome a debt or currency crisis? The IMF always uses the same program, regardless of whether it is Russia or Argentina, Zimbabwe or South Korea, all very different cultures, economies and situations. The IMF demands are often referred to as the Washington Consensus, the name given in 1990 by a US economist and IMF backer, John Williamson, to describe the IMF method of attack.
IMF medicine almost always includes demands to privatise state industries, to slash public spending even on health and education, devalue the national currency against the dollar, and open the country to free flow of international capital-both in and, especially, out.

First the IMF demands the government in question sign a secret Memorandum of Understanding with the IMF, in which it agrees to a list of "conditionalities", the pre-condition for getting any penny of IMF aid. Under todays globalise free capital markets, banks do not invest in a country that does not have the IMF seal of approval. So the IMF role is far more than giving some emergency loan. It determines if a country gets any money from any source at all-World Bank, private banks and other.
The conditions of an IMF deal are always the same. Privatisation of state industries is top on the list. The effect of privatisation with a cheap Peso or Rouble currency is that foreign dollar investors are able to buy up the prime assets of a country dirt-cheap. Often the lure of under-the-table deals in privatising their national assets corrupts the politicians involved in the country. Foreign multinationals can grab profitable mining, oil, or other national treasures with their dollars.

The case of the Yeltsin government in Russia is classic, with dollar billionaires emerging overnight on the looting of national assets via IMF-dictated privatisation. The Clinton Administration backed the process fully. They knew it turned Russia into a dollar zone, and that was the intent.
The second demand of the IMF is that a country liberalize, that is open, its financial and banking markets to foreign investors. This allows high-profile speculators like George Soros or Citibank or Credit Suisse to come into a country, run up asset prices in a speculation, take huge profits, as in Thailand in the mid-1990s, and quickly sell, then exit with huge gains, as the local economy collapses behind them. Then Western multinationals can come in after, and take prime assets at very low cost.

This is what happened to Asia in the 1990s. The IMF and US Treasury, which actually determines US IMF policy, began strong pressure on the fast-growing East Asia "Tiger" economies in 1993, to remove national controls on capital flows. They argued it would help Asia get large sums of money to invest. What it did was give US pension funds and big banks a huge new market for speculation. Too much money flowed in, and an unhealthy real estate bubble grew. It burst when Soros and other US speculators deliberately pulled the plug in 1997, triggering the Asia crisis. The end result was that for the first time, Asian economies were forced to turn to the IMF to be rescued.
But the IMF did not "rescue" any Asian economy in 1998. It rescued international banks and hedge fund speculators. In Indonesia, the IMF demanded the government raise interest rates to 80%, on the argument that would keep foreign investors from leaving, and stabilize the situation. In fact, as critics like Joseph Stiglitz charged at the time, the IMF interest rate demands guaranteed a full-blown collapse of the Indonesian and other Asian banking systems

.
Once the IMF got control of South Korea, one of the strongest industrial economies in the world, it demanded break-up of large industry conglomerates, charging "corruption" and "crony capitalism." In fact, Washington hoped to weaken a growing competitor and open the door for US companies like GM or Ford to take over. In part it worked, until Korea and other regional economies were strong enough to re-impose national controls. Malaysia openly defied the IMF demands and imposed currency controls during the crisis. The damage to Malaysia was minimal as a result, a great embarrassment to the IMF.

The next step for IMF conditions, is the demand a country turn to "market-based" domestic prices. This is code for eliminating government subsidies or price controls. Often developing countries have state-subsidized fuel or food or other necessities for their people. In 1998 the IMF demanded, for example, that Indonesia remove state food subsidies for the poor. The idea of "market-based price" is itself a fiction. A market is man-made. The market in Switzerland or Denmark or Japan is different from the market in Cuba or Cameroon. What the IMF is after is a slashing of state budgets to minimize the state role in the economy and make a target country defenceless against foreign takeover of its key assets. The government share in the fragile economy is cut also, in order to insure foreign banks get their "pound of flesh."
Finally the IMF demands the country devalue its currency, and massively, often by 60-70% or more. Here the argument is that this will make its exports "more competitive" and bring more income to repay the foreign dollar debts. This is a crucial part of the IMF Washington Consensus medicine. If, say, Chile devalues the Peso in half, or the Republic of Congo, it must export twice as many tons of copper to earn the same dollar of export surplus. For the giant multinationals in the industrial world, it means the cost of raw materials has become cheaper by half.

Over the past twenty years since the IMF stepped in to play the major role in reorganising developing countries, world raw materials prices have been dramatically depressed, even though demand has risen. The reason is that countries of Africa, Latin America and elsewhere are mainly raw materials exporters, and their commodities, like oil, are all exported in dollars. They need to earn dollars to repay dollar debts. The IMF policies have driven their raw material prices, measured in dollars, drastically lower. This has been deliberate, but is never admitted. The IMF is an agency of American dollar domination of the global economy, not an agency to help developing countries.

The real IMF record

None of this is exaggeration, unfortunately. IMF defenders claim that "market liberalization" has resulted in major economic growth over the past 20 years in developing countries. The reality is opposite. In a study done by Joseph Stiglitz when he was at the World Bank, between 1989 and 1997 the GDP of every country in the former Soviet Union had fallen to levels of 30% to 80% of that before the collapse of state controls, with the sole exception of Poland. The level in Russia was only 60% that in 1989. GDP had collapsed 40%, and unemployment went from 2 million to 60 million. The rapid privatisation without adequate legal and institutional safeguards such as unemployment insurance or health insurance, led to social catastrophe comparable to wartime. IMF demands to free capital movement allowed new Russian dollar oligarchs such as Berezovsky to plunder billions of dollars and put it into secret bank accounts in Cyprus or Liechtenstein, while they bought luxury villas in Monte Carlo.
The IMF record in Africa is as outrageous and destructive. In Zimbabwe, the IMF demanded the government privatise certain state companies and cut subsidies on food, education and health care to get IMF aid. The government complied with most demands, and then the IMF accused it of funding the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using that as an excuse to deny giving Zimbabwe loans. In Kenya the IMF earlier demanded that specific individuals be named to the government of Moi, people friendly to Western interests. Washington then charged these governments being "corrupt," which conveniently blinds Western opinion from realizing the moral travesty-taking place under IMF auspices.

Deeper in debt ...

Take the official World Bank debt statistics and it becomes obvious that the IMF game is to support the dollar. The first debt crisis in the Third World erupted in 1982. The IMF stepped in to "stabilize" the debt problem. Since then, the foreign debts of developing countries have risen exponentially. In Argentina, the earlier "success" of the IMF, foreign debt stood at $62 billion in 1990. In 2000 it was $146 billion. Brazil's foreign debt has gone from $120 billion to $240 billion in the same time. Iran, isolated from the IMF system by US sanctions, is one of the few developing countries, which has managed to reduce its foreign debt.
The total foreign dollar debt of all low and middle-income countries rose from $1.4 trillion in 1990 to $2.5 trillion in 2000, almost double. In most cases, the unpayable interest costs on the debts were merely added to the amount of principal owed foreign lenders, at compound interest rate, of course. With compound interest charges often 10% to 15% per year, the debt grows exponentially.

The result is a Ponzi debt pyramid, in which the more a country pays, the more it owes. Bankers call it "interest capitalization." It is no different from the plight of a poor shopkeeper debtor who is forced to turn to a mafia loan shark to survive and ends up paying more and more at ever more interest, until he is bankrupt and the mafia takes all his possessions. The IMF and banks know only some 80% of Third World debts can ever be repaid. They care only about the legal fiction and the ability to use the debt as a lever to grab assets cheaply. According to the World Bank, between 1980 and 1986, for a group of 109 debtor countries, payment of interest alone to the creditors on foreign debts totalled $326 billion. Repayment of principal on the same debts totalled another $322 billion, for a combined capital flow out to the New York and other creditor banks, in debt service, of $658 billions on an original debt of $430 billion. Yet, despite this enormous effort, these 109 debtors still owed the banks a sum of $882 billion in 1986. This was because of the pyramid effect of compound interest, interest capitalization and Volcker's floating rate policy.

In 1990 the developing world repaid some $150 billion in interest on dollar debt, three times all aid received. This was a huge boost to the dollar credit system, which lends on the basis of assuming it will be repaid the entire $2.5 trillion third world debt. The IMF allows that myth to continue. Occupied Iraq today must still "honour" billions in debts of the Hussein era, many to the former Soviet Union, despite its devastated situation. Russia is still forced to admit billions in debt from the Soviet era to Western agencies. Under the IMF system, debt is more sacred than human life.
The vicious trick in all IMF-led "debt restructuring," is that so long as a debtor is able to pay interest on its loans, the creditor banks in New York or London or elsewhere do not have to declare their loan in default. Even if they know it never will be repaid, they treat it as if it were a fully good credit, and use it as capital collateral for further bank lending. The banking system of the dollar world is to a major degree propped up by the pyramid of unpayable third world loans from Africa to Indonesia to Argentina to Croatia.

There has been a dramatic slowdown in economic growth in developing economies over the past two decades since the IMF was brought in to police the debtor states in 1982. There is a direct link. In Latin America, if we take per capita GDP growth, there was a growth of 75% between 1960 and 1980. In the following 20 years to 2000, per capita GDP grew a mere 6%.
In Sub-Sahara Africa, per capita GDP grew by 36% in the two-decade period to 1980. Then, it fell by a staggering 15% the next two decades. According to the World Bank itself, some 300 million Africans, almost half of the Continent, survive on less than ? 0.65 a day. IMF-dictated cuts in national health care have resulted in rising infant mortality across the Continent. In 2002 Malawi underwent famine. It coincided with the April 2002 decision by the IMF to suspend Malawi on allegations of "corruption." The IMF had ordered Malawi's government to sell its grain reserves in order to repay a South African bank loan of the National Food Reserve Agency. The IMF also ordered export of maize to service debt, ignoring a developing famine crisis. The IMF piously denied it played any role in the famine crisis however.

For Arab states, including Algeria, Morocco, GDP growth per capita swung from a plus 175% between 1960-1980 to a minus 2% in the following two decades, a staggering collapse.
The only apparent exception to this negative trend is East Asia including China. Here growth was faster between 1980 and 2000. But the reason is the including of China, which saw a 400% increase in GDP and accounts for 83% of the region's population. China has adamantly refused any dealings with the IMF, and runs a controlled state-guided economy with full currency controls, hardly an IMF model state.
Globalisation is a word used today, often without precision. If we use the word globalisation to refer to the entire process of IMF and WTO-led neo-colonialism under the Dollar System, then it is a descriptive term. It describes the creation of a global dollar imperium, a Pax Americana. Establishment critics of the IMF system such as Joseph Stiglitz, himself a former Clinton adviser and World Bank official, make accurate charges against the IMF. They assume, however, that it is merely misguided policy that leads to the problems. The entire IMF institution, along with the World Bank and WTO, however, have been deliberately developed to advance this globalisation of the Dollar System, the second pillar of Pax Americana after the military power. It is no mistaken policy, no result of bureaucratic blunders. That is the crucial point to be understood. The IMF exists to support the Dollar System.

Cromwell (material collated from F. William Engdahl) Public Citizen

Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?

Editor's Introductory Note: Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century, often associated with the Maunder Minimum. Before that came the "Medieval Warm Period", in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily "global".

However, "Global Warming" in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that.

But we're hearing far too often that the "science" is "settled", and that it is mankind's contribution to the natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing "Greenhouse Effect", which is the root "cause" of global warming. We're also hearing that "all the world's scientists now agree on this settled science", and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global catastrophe. And last, but not least, we're seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing. Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest. Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?

Sorry folks, but we're not exactly buying into the Global Hysteria just yet. We know a great deal about atmospheric physics, (bio) and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy. The extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic ( man-made ) Global Warming made us more than a little bit suspicious that no one had really taken a close look at the science. We also knew that the catch-all activity today known as "Climate Science" was in its infancy, and that atmospheric modeling did not and still does not exist which can predict changes in the weather or climate more than about a day or two in advance.

So the endless stream of dire predictions of what was going to happen years or decades from now if we did not drastically reduce our CO2 production by virtually shutting down the economies of the world appeared to be more the product of radical political and environmental activism rather than science. Thus, we embarked on a personal quest for more information, armed with a strong academic background in postgraduate physics and a good understanding of the advanced mathematics necessary in such a pursuit. This fundamental knowledge of the core principles of matter and its many exceptionally complex interactions allowed us to research and understand the foundations of many other sciences. In short, we read complex scientific articles in many other scientific disciplines with relative ease and good understanding - like most folks read comic books.

As our own knowledge of "climate science" grew, so grew our doubts over the "settled science". What we found was the science was far from "settled".. in fact it was barely underway.

It was for a while a somewhat lonely quest, what with "all the world's scientists" apparently having no doubt. Finally, in December 2007 we submitted an article to one of our local newspapers, the Addison Independent, thinking they would be delighted in having at minimum an alternative view of the issue. Alas, they chose not to publish it, but two weeks after our submission (by the strangest coincidence), published yet another "pro-global-warming" feature written by an individual whom, to the best we could determine, had no advanced training in any science at all, beyond self-taught it would appear. Still, the individual had published a number of popular books on popular environmental issues, was well-loved by those of similar political bent, and was held in high esteem among his peers. We had learned a valuable lesson: Popular Journalists trump coupled sets of 2nd-order partial differential equations every time. Serious science doesn't matter if you have the press in your pocket.

In fairness to the Addison Independent and its editors, our article was somewhat lengthy and technical, and presumably the average reader most likely could not follow or even be interested in an alternative viewpoint, since everyone knew by now that the global warming issue was "settled science". And we confess that we like the paper, subscribe to it, and know a number of folks who work there personally. They're all good folks, and they have every right to choose what does or doesn't go in their publication. They also have a right to spin the news any direction they choose, because that's what freedom of the press is all about. Seems everyone, both left and right, does it - and it's almost certain we will be accused of doing the same here. And we just may be, as hard as we may try to avoid it. We humans aren't all shaped by the same cookie cutter, and that's a blessing that has taken us as a species to the top of the food chain.

But by then we had been sharing our own independent research of the literature with others via email, and receiving a surprising amount of agreement back in return. (We're in contact with a large number of fellow scientists around the country, dating back to our college days in the 17th century when beer was a quarter a bottle). One local friend, in particular, kept pressing us to publish, and even offered to set up a "debate" with the Popular Journalist who had usurped our original article. This we politely declined, arguing that "debate" cannot prove or disprove science...science must stand on its own.

But then something unusual happened. On Dec. 13, 2007, 100 scientists jointly signed an Open Letter to Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, requesting they cease the man-made global warming hysteria and settle down to helping mankind better prepare for natural disasters. The final signature was from the President of the World Federation of Scientists.

At last, we were not alone...

We decided to publish the results of our counter-exploration on the internet - but in a somewhat uniquely different fashion. Knowing that most folks aren't geeks, and may have little understanding of science or math, we're going to attempt to teach some of the essential physics and such as we go along. Readers with little or no mathematical or scientific training may find it challenging, but if you have a general understanding of introductory college or even solid high school level chemistry or physics, you should have no problem in following this amazing tale. The brighter readers, even without a science background, should be able to follow, as well. Smart folks learn faster than most.

What follows is a tale gleaned from many sources over what turned out to be an unreasonably long period of time. We'll be first examining a "worst case" scenario, using very simple math at first, in order to arrive in a ballpark that will tell us if we need to go further and pull out long strings of complicated equations, which we don't want to have to resort to because we're writing for the average layman who is not a rocket scientist. This is a valid scientific method despite its apparent simplicity, for if one can first determine that a person does not own a motorcycle, then you don't have to spend a lot of time calculating how likely he is to crash while riding it. Reducing it to the simplest of terms for the average person to understand was a daunting task. Below is an example of what "real" Climate Scientists have to deal with on a daily basis. Is it any wonder that the most popular majors in college are liberal arts?

Snipped from an article entitled
Solar-Cycle Warming at the Earth’s Surface and an Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity.
By Ka-Kit Tung and Charles D. Camp
Department of Applied Mathematics
University of Washington, Seattle Washington

Let's take a short glance at the equation at the left, because you're never going to see anything like it again in this editorial. To most of you, it is gobbly-gook, but to a physicist, it is part of a mathematical proof accompanying a particular study done on the sun's role in Global Warming. What the authors are explaining is they have found that the total solar irradiance (TSI) has been measured by orbiting satellites since 1978 and it varies on an 11-year cycle by about 0.07%. So, from solar min to solar max, the TSI reaching the earth’s surface increases at a rate comparable to the radiative heating due to a 1% per year increase in greenhouse gases, and will probably add, during the next five to six years in the advancing phase of Solar Cycle 24, almost 0.2 °K to the globally-averaged temperature, thus doubling the amount of transient global warming expected from greenhouse warming alone. Whew....

Don't fret - neither Al Gore nor any of the Popular Journalists can understand it either.

We'll try to reference most of the material, but if we miss a credit, or use a photograph someone didn't want to share with the world (OK, we wonder why the photo was on the web if that were the case) we'll quickly remove it with our apologies. And let's freely admit up front that what we offer here is a dissenting opinion, and surely we have "cherry-picked" the articles of others which are also contrary to the widely held current beliefs. A bit of this is original on our part, but most of it comes from others around the globe. We have tried to present work from what we believe to be credible, thoroughly diligent scientists actively engaged in current research. Let's get started:

We're reminded of an earlier story, which happened back in 1912. This was the amazing discovery of a skull and jawbone in which was quickly named the Piltdown Man and which all the world's archaeologists immediately accepted as a hitherto unknown form of early human. It appears no one bothered to examine it closely, assuming that other scientists had thoroughly investigated and vetted it. The hoax wasn't uncovered until 1953, when it was learned that the skull was that of a modern man and the jaw that of an orangutan. Seems no one had ever bothered to take a really close look at the artifact.

Well, folks, it does appear we have a new, 21st Century Piltdown Man, and this time we know his name.

He's called "Anthropogenic Global Warming"

It's hard to nail down exactly when the sky started falling, but certainly the work of Michael Mann provided its first global exposure. Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist ( one who attempts to interpret the past climate through certain Paleolithic records, such as ice core samples, sea bed sediments, coral heads, and tree ring growth ), submitted a paper to Nature magazine in 1998 which, unfortunately, was not subjected to peer review before publication. In it, he offered what has now become known as the famous "hockey stick" chart, showing the earth's temperature having been relatively constant for the past thousand years before suddenly skyrocketing upward at the dawn of the 20th century. His interpretation was that man's production of CO₂ in the modern age was obviously responsible for the sudden increase. It turned out to be one of the biggest scientific blunders of all time.

Look carefully at the chart above, which is the famous "hockey stick" chart. Note the horizontal scale is in years, stretching from the year 1000 to the near present time. The vertical scale is in degrees Centigrade, and note carefully that it is graded in increments of 1/10 of a degree. That means the wiggly blue section in the middle is actually only varying up and down by about a half of a degree. The baseline, as noted, is set at the average of the recorded temperatures from 1961 to 1990. Also note that only the red portion represents actual measured temperatures - the rest is based on the assumption that one can interpret past temperatures from examining ancient tree rings or ice core samples from centuries-old ice locked in glaciers. This is, at best, a marriage of apples and oranges - the handle being somewhat of an educated guess, and the blade being based on actual measurements using thermometric recording devices. Sort of like pairing the skull of a human with the jawbone of an orangutan. And finally, note that the chart is for the northern hemisphere only. This chart, unfortunately, became the foundation for the first report of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), which in turn provided the summary information and recommendations to the world's governments. The Anthropogenic Global Warming panic was off to a rocketing start.

However, some folks noticed a couple of significant and fairly well accepted climatological history facts to be conspicuously missing. The first was the well-documented "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures, at least in Europe as mentioned in our introduction, were significantly higher. The second was the "Little Ice Age", a period in which the temperatures dropped so low the Thames River in London froze over.

How could this be an accurate record of the last millennium?

Let's pause and mention that the data above is not "raw" data. Dr. Mann actually used about 70-80 data sets, and in each set he applied a mathematical analysis known as a principle component analysis ( PCA ) which seeks to extract principal, or significant component information from a widely varying set of raw data.

Along comes Steve McIntyre, a Canadian analyst, who spends two years of his own personal time reverse-engineering Dr. Mann's PCA program. McIntyre subjects Mann's PCA program to a "Monte Carlo" analysis - which inserts random data sets into the function - and discovered that no matter what data he fed it, the result was always the same. The arm of the "hockey stick" ( paleo-record ) always came out straight. In Dr. Mann's case, the rising temperature of the Medieval Warm Period and the expected trough of the Little Ice Age had been completely erased. The hockey stick was broken. Fini. Kaput. We may never know whether Mann's work was deliberately contrived to fit some personal environmental agenda, or just a colossal mathematical blunder.

McIntyre submitted his work to Nature Magazine - since they were responsible for publishing Mann's flawed research without peer review in the first place, but they reportedly rejected it, saying it was "too long". He then shortened it to 500 words, and re-submitted it, but again it was rejected, this time saying it was "too mathematical" or words to that effect. Heaven forbid any publication calling itself an "International Weekly Journal of Science" from actually publishing any science that hinged on mathematics. Let's all push a yard stick into the snow, measure the snow depth, call ourselves "climate scientists", and get published in Nature. In the end, McIntyre turned to the internet and its true freedom of the press, and today he is known to every serious climate scientist on the planet as the man who broke the hockey stick.

The National Academy of Sciences has found Mann's graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from zero” – i.e., the graph was useless.

The Medieval Warm Period, of which the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming don't want you to be aware, was a period in which agriculture flourished, helping Europe emerge from the Dark Ages.

The Little Ice Age produced crop failures from too-short growing seasons leading to widespread hunger and even starvation in some more northern locales.

Since our emergence from the Little Ice Age, agriculture has again flourished, and most of us hope it lasts quite a while longer. This is certainly no cause for panic, and a few of us think being comfortably warm and having plenty to eat is actually good.

And Tom Nelson has a few more graphs the AGW folks don't want you to see posted HERE.

Into the Laboratory, it's time to go to work.

Next, let's take a look CO2 from an Atmospheric Physicist's view - straightforward physics that we hope most of you will be able to follow:

What we commonly call "light" is actually electromagnetic radiation, physically no different from radio waves, except of different frequencies and wavelengths. The part we can see is called the visible spectrum. Beyond what we can see in the higher frequencies ( and shorter wavelengths, since they are reciprocal functions ) lies the ultraviolet spectrum. UV light is very penetrating, which is why one could get sunburned on an overcast day. Beyond even that are X-rays, which can penetrate much deeper. On the opposite end of the visible spectrum lies infra-red... which you can't see, but you can easily feel, as anyone who has warmed his hands near a hot stove can testify. It is the infrared portion we commonly refer to as "heat" radiation. And beyond that are the radio and television wavelengths we all know and love.

The sun is very "bright", and its frequency spectrum is generally too short to produce much infrared coming down through the atmosphere. Radiation from the sun penetrates the atmosphere, strikes the earth, and some of it is absorbed and some is reflected. The different bandwidths (colors) of reflected light depend on the material struck, so something green-colored is reflecting the green portion of the visible spectrum and absorbing the rest. This heats up the earth, and that's the first part of the story.

All heated bodies emit radiation in the infrared range. This is called "black body" radiation, because a perfectly black body reflects no visible light but still emits radiation in a specified band of wavelengths. Infrared radiation is of a much longer wavelength, and can be much easier absorbed by certain components in the atmosphere, causing them to also "heat up". The warm air around us is being kept warm partially from black body radiation coming from the earth itself. Another method of warming is by conduction - air coming in contact with the heated soil, rocks, trees, buildings, etc. and being directly warmed by that contact. This may be a bigger factor than we think, but we're not going to attempt to try to determine just how much that might be. We'd have to know the total surface area of every object - down to the smallest blade of grass - there is on our planet. We also need to remind ourselves that there is actually no physical quantity known as "cold". There is only "heat" and "lack of heat".

Next, lets talk about a scientific process called Atomic Absorption Spectrometry. It is a method by which we can measure precisely which wavelengths of radiation a particular gas is capable of absorbing.

In our highly simplified drawing above, a radiation source is beamed through a glass container containing a gas sample. As the radiation passes through, a portion of it is absorbed at particular narrow bandwidths (often more than one ) so the end result are some "missing" sections of the whole spectrum coming from the source, which show up as dark lines. They're missing because they were absorbed by the sample in the chamber. They are called absorption lines, or absorption spectra, and when analyzed by a knowledgeable person, can tell one what the gas or gas mixture is in the sample chamber based on a catalog of known spectra. It's a wonderful tool for analyzing unknown gas samples.

Let's look at a real result, below - the absorption spectrum for pure carbon dioxide plus an amount of water vapor equal to that in our current atmosphere as the sample and infrared radiation from a black body spectrum as the source. This is part of the so-called "greenhouse effect"

As we can see above, carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in only three narrow bands of frequencies, which correspond to wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM), respectively. The percentage absorption of all three lines combined can be very generously generously estimated at about 8% of the whole IR spectrum, which means that 92% of the "heat" passes right through without being absorbed by CO2. In reality, the two smaller peaks don't account for much, since they lie in an energy range that is much smaller than the where the 15 micron peak sits - so 4% or 5% might be closer to reality. If the entire atmosphere were composed of nothing but CO2, i.e., was pure CO2 and nothing else, it would still only be able to absorb no more than 8% of the heat radiating from the earth.

To give you a feeling for how little CO2 there actually is in the atmosphere, let's note that atoms and molecules are very tiny things, and the distances between them are therefore also very small. Physicists like to use a unit of measure called an Angstrom, which is a 0.1 nano-meters, or a 0.1 billionth of a meter. A molecule like CO2 has a size of around 2 Angstroms, and in our case, the experts tell us the average spacing is about 33 Angstroms apart. This is in a situation where the density of the gas is 10 to the 24th power number of molecules occupying a space of about 22 liters, at a pressure of 760mm of mercury and 273 degrees Kelvin - called the "standard temperature and pressure". You can think of all this as just the normal temperature and pressure around you right now.

Since CO2 is a very tiny molecule, let's magnify the picture to the point where a CO2 molecule is the size of a bottle cap (let's call it one inch in diameter) tacked to the side of a barn. At the surface of the earth, this would mean a pure CO2 atmosphere would look like a bunch of bottle caps tacked up with a spacing of about 33 bottle caps apart, or 33 inches in between. But as we go higher and higher up into the air, the density starts to decrease, and the distance between bottle caps starts to increase, as well. At about 18,000 feet, the air is only half as dense so the distance between our bottle caps of pure CO2 is now about 70 inches apart.

Remember, we've been talking about a theoretical atmosphere that is 100% CO2 and nothing else. In reality, the current concentration of CO2 is only 380 parts per million, so now we have to paint our CO2 bottle caps red and mix them in with a lot more other gasses and water vapor, which we should probably paint blue.

So, let's use our imagination and tack up a million one-inch bottle caps on the side of a really big building, with them all spaced 33 inches apart, and with only 380 of them being red and the rest all blue. If they're evenly mixed up ( like the wind mixes the atmosphere ) then the red bottle caps (representing CO2) now are going to be spaced 86,840 inches, or 7,230 feet apart. Now you know why we call CO2 a "trace gas" in the atmosphere. But we've been talking about a flat target, and in reality our problem is 3-dimensional. We need to now imagine a really really big room with one-inch marbles floating instead of bottle caps. Closest to us, the CO2 marbles are spaced 7,230 feet apart. Farther back in the room, the density has thinned to 14,460 feet apart, and at the far end (the edge of space) the marbles have thinned to zero.

Next, let's load up a B-B gun with 100 B-Bs, 8 of which are silver and 92 of which are black. The 8 silver B-Bs are the only ones capable of heating up the CO2 molecules if they happen to hit one. Then we start shooting at our 3-dimensional target, hoping to hit one of the few red marbles with one of the few silver B-Bs. This whole picture we have drawn illustrates both how little CO2 there is in the atmosphere, and how relatively little of the radiation it is capable of absorbing and "heating" the atmosphere. We know that most of the other IR radiation bands slips through and doesn't get to do any heating at all. (We've all seen the nice IR photographs taken from the space station.) But some scientists such as Dr. Heinz Hug who specialize in study of this stuff claims that all of the heat in these particular spectra are indeed absorbed in a relatively short distance, so adding more CO2 to the atmosphere can't affect anything at any rate. Other scientists, such as Dr. Roy W. Spencer at NASA - and one of the leading experts in the field of climate science - doesn't completely agree

We've decided to be exceptionally generous to all concerned in the debate and look at the worst-case scenario, where we'll say that all of the available heat in the CO2 absorption spectrum is actually captured. We know that man is responsible for about 3 % of it, so with the simplest of math, we have .03 x .08 = .0024. And remember that 8% figure was actually larger than reality, since the two side peaks don't have much energy to capture.

Man-made CO2 doesn't appear physically capable of absorbing much more than
two-thousandths of the radiated heat (IR) passing upward through the atmosphere.

And, if all of the available heat in that spectrum is indeed being captured by the current CO2 levels before leaving the atmosphere, then adding more CO2 to the atmosphere won't matter a bit.

In short, the laws of physics don't seem to allow CO2 it's currently assumed place as a significant "greenhouse gas" based on present concentrations. The other "greenhouse gases" such as methane, nitrous oxide, tetrafluoromethane, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hexafluoride, trifluoromethane, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, and 1,1-difluoroethane exist only in extraordinarily smaller amounts and aren't even up for serious discussion by any segment of the scientific community. And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O₂ ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N₂) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:

"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds."

We can safely ballpark water vapor as being responsible for more than 95% of all the greenhouse effect, with oxygen and nitrogen playing no role and carbon dioxide being relatively insignificant... particularly the even smaller human-produced part.

Side note: Both Oxygen and Nitrogen don't like to live alone. They prefer to find another and stick together into a diatomic ( 2 atom ) molecule. Thus the molecular weight of atmospheric oxygen or nitrogen is approximately twice that of one of them alone. We say "approximately", because it takes energy to bind them together, and mass and energy are equivalent stuff, as our good friend Dr. Einstein explained with his famous equation E=MC^2.

Now, you can sit back and give yourself a pat on the back, because you now know more pure physics of the atmosphere than a lot of so-called "climate scientists", and likely know more than almost all of the non-scientist Popular Journalists and other writers churning out panic-stricken books and newspaper articles on the subject.

And for sure, you now know a lot more than Al Gore.

One would think this would be the end of the discussion, that the laws of physics show us that CO₂ isn't even a significant "greenhouse gas" and certainly the human contribution is insignificant. We both now know that CO₂can't possibly be the evil byproduct all the ballyhoo has been claiming, and in fact, our biologist friends tell us if we could increase the CO₂ content a little more, the planet would be much the richer... because plants love it, grow much larger with more of it, and we all like to eat. CO₂is a non-toxic, non-polluting, earth-friendly component that really is critical to our survival. Maybe that's why we laughed so hard when the Popular Journalist in the Addison Independent insisted that 340, rather than 380 parts per million CO₂ was a "target" we should all shoot for. While you're pulling rabbits out of a hat, could you please bring me a Pepsi?

OK, if you still are compelled to worry about something, think about this: The amount of oxygen in our atmosphere is slowly diminishing. A very long time ago, it was as much as 35% of the atmosphere, and has been shrinking ever since. We always wondered why those plant-eating eating dinosaurs had such long necks, and now we know - they had to reach up for dinner into the really tall trees that once dotted our oxygen-rich planet.

But let's not worry about that just now, for this current story is far from over. If you've read this far, you're likely more curious than most, and probably more intelligent than average. And you probably want to know exactly what is causing the warming and cooling periods on the planet which have been going on for millennia. Inquiring minds want to know this stuff.

Let's break for a minute, and point out that "Climate Science" is a catch-all term, like "Sports". The fellow who takes a daily temperature reading or measures the snow depth with a stick could call himself a "Climate Scientist" as much as the person tending the boiler in the basement could call himself a "Stationary Engineer". Earth's climate is an enormously complex subject, spanning not only the "pure" sciences like physics and chemistry, but many of the "natural sciences", such as oceanography, meteorology, volcanology, paleontology, archeology, solar science, and many others. All scientists aren't of the same quality, intellect, or natural talent for the trade. Sloppy scientists are as common as bad mechanics.

At the top of the pecking order of knowledge needs sit the fundamental laws of physics - for no matter what others may determine, the final results must obey the fundamental, established principles which determine the nature of all elemental matter. Unfortunately, many "environmental scientists" actually study very little physics, chemistry or biology in depth. And many of the "lower" sciences involve little mathematics beyond introductory calculus. Before the greater body of scientists out there start beating on us, we'll admit that very few physicists had a time slot to study organic chemistry and beyond in college - and the truth of the matter is, there aren't enough semester hours available for everyone to be cross-trained in other disciplines to any competent depth. This makes becoming a highly skilled "Climate Scientist" very challenging, for this extremely complex field requires a very large tool kit. Thus, we trust others to deliver meaningful results from their specific disciplines. If a geologist tells us a particular rock is from the Devonian Period, we have little choice but to believe him. So in what follows, we're going to have to trust we have chosen good, solid scientists from other disciplines as our guide.

In reading "scientific articles" one must also be very alert to use of the word "if". This is the killer word - the Colt .45 of sloppy or even deliberately misleading science. "If" the sea level rises 40 feet, then certainly most of Manhattan will be flooded. "If" the moon falls on Kansas, then certainly wheat prices are going to soar out of site. Within a sentence or two, "if" morphs into "when" and soon everyone is convinced that the moon is absolutely going to fall on Kansas, it's just a matter of time, we're all doomed... unless we take immediate action to stop it. But neither of these are very likely to happen, as we shall soon see.

After the hockey stick was accepted virtually overnight without close examination ( like the Piltdown Man ), along comes Al Gore, a long-time "environmentalist", ( who made near-failing grades in science and math in college ) who decides to make a movie out of it. The hockey stick goes up on the big screen, and Gore boards a mechanical lift with cameras grinding, pointer in hand as he rises in unison with the blade of the stick which starts growing upward toward the ceiling. No longer are we talking about tenths of a degree, the temperature is rising like a puff pastry, and headed toward the attic. It all began with the word "if". If the hockey stick tip continues to rise (lift starts going upward, the audience holds its breath ) then... and along comes computer animations of New York flooding, Florida underwater, and poor little Polar Bears struggling to board the last piece of ice floating in the open Arctic Sea. (sigh...) It ends with Hurricane Katrina and Boston almost losing the pennant. It is Hollywood at its finest, and the Deacons of La La Land give it an Oscar. Even the Nobel Committee is impressed, gives it two thumbs-up and a Nobel Prize to Gore and the other members of the IPCC for the many lives that will be saved in the future because of this brilliant early warning. And, there's still time for we miserable humans to "save" the planet by buying "carbon offsets" accomplished best by investing in Al Gore's British company which buys stock in other companies that will benefit from a world-wide global warming hysteria (keeping a healthy cut) and making, perhaps, Al Gore the richest former Vice President in history. That will buy a lot of SUV's, jets, and large mansions with mega-electric bills. Everyone wins except the taxpayer and businessman, who are soon to pay a very heavy price.

So what's really causing the endless cycles of warming and cooling, if it isn't a constantly changing "Greenhouse Effect" - with man to blame? Man wasn't producing much CO₂ in the past million years, so he hasn't simply been turning the greenhouse up and down at will. Just look up - one of the most likely culprits is our old friend, the Sun.

Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth's climate changes—and Earth's current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun's irradiance.

Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in fish numbers on Canada's West Coast. Since the Canadian West had no long-term written fishery records, Patterson's research team drilled sediment cores in the deep local fjords to get 5,000-year climate profiles from the mud. The mud showed the past climate conditions: Warm summers left layers thick with one-celled fossils and fish scales. Cold, wet periods showed dark sediments, mostly dirt washed from the surrounding land. Patterson's fishing profiles clearly revealed the sun's 87 and 210-year solar cycles—and the longer, 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles found since the 1980s in ice cores, tree rings, and fossil pollen.

"Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century's modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate changes. Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered," says Patterson.

"In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2000, Vizer, Shaviv, Carslaw and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies ... varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system... These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation, which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet."

"When the sun is less bright, more cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form and the planet cools... This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere ... was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age."

The Canadian expert concludes, "CO₂ variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales. Instead, Earth's sea surface temperatures show a massive 95 percent lagged correlation with the sunspot index." We'll talk about what a "correlation" means in a couple of minutes.

So what does this all mean? It means, in the simplest of terms, that it is the Sun which is warming the oceans, not an increased "Greenhouse Effect" caused by human activity.

And, it might appear that Mother Earth is not the only one suffering from the Sun's effect. Data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey mission in 2005 disclosed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps” near Mars’ south pole had been shrinking for three consecutive summers. Mmmm... We could go on for endless pages on solar science and the sun's relationship to global warming, but we're not going to do that. One of the best summary articles we've found in simple layman terms is by Kevin Roeten, and you can read more on that by clicking HERE.

The current warming Solar Cycle is just about over.
The global temperatures have been nominally flat for the past 8 years.
If the Solar Scientists are correct, we about to head into a cooling cycle... which is not good news.

Let's get back to our own science project.

The above chart shows two things we immediately recognize as very similar. In fact they seem to match each other very well. We would say they have a strong correlation, and with a little mathematics, we could compare each one point-by-point on the graph and come up with a number that would tell us just how well they match each other, called a correlation coefficient. In fact, a glance at the above suggests a perfect, 100% correlation, because in fact one is an exact copy of the other. We know this because we made the chart.

Now suppose the blue one represents changing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and the red one represents changing global temperatures over the same time frame. The above is a gross exaggeration, of course, but we wanted to make sure no one doubted there is a strong correlation between the two. Is there any doubt that CO2 is causing the global temperature to change? Any doubt at all? None? Zero doubt, right?

Wrong In fact, the blue line line is exactly one pixel on your screen ahead of the red line. We know that because we made the chart. You couldn't tell that one was exactly like the other and actually leading it by one pixel without dragging out a powerful magnifying device and doing some very careful measurements and some pretty lengthy mathematics.

This was the fundamental mistake that Mann, Al Gore, the Oscar boys, the Nobel Committee, the IPCC, and just about everyone else on the planet made at the beginning. They immediately assumed, noticing that CO₂ levels and global temperatures had a pretty good correlation, that CO₂ was the culprit, and was causing global temperatures to rise. In fact, it appears it was just the opposite: rising global temperatures caused increased CO₂ level in the atmosphere.

So where did the increasing CO₂ come from? You can't make CO₂ out of Oxygen and Nitrogen... surely you're pulling my leg!

Let's do a little simple Chemistry, and figure out the molecular mass of the different atmospheric constituents. For this we go to the Periodic Table of the Elements, and find the atomic mass of Nitrogen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen. Let's forget about Argon, which is about 0.9% of the atmosphere, because it's supposed to be CO₂ that's the evil stuff. To the nearest round number, Carbon = 12, Nitrogen = 14, Oxygen = 16, and lowly Hydrogen = 1. That's based on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. The Periodic Table will give a slightly different number, because of that binding energy ( which is a mass equivalent ) we talked about earlier.

So, what's the approximate molecular mass of the different gasses? That's simple addition:

Water (H₂O)

1 +1+16 = 18 amu

Nitrogen (N₂)

14 + 14 = 28 amu

Oxygen (O₂)

16 + 16 = 32 amu

Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

12 + 16 + 16 = 44 amu

Remember, we're rounding off to the nearest whole number, and amu means Atomic Mass Units.

Do you see something significant? Think like a scientist. Yes, CO₂ is by far the heaviest of the major constituents, and the law of gravity applies to it as well. It sinks to the ground.. in fact, into the ground, and into the oceans, as well, because CO2 is very water-soluble and that's what puts the fizz in Ginger Ale.

This doesn't happen overnight. In fact, the winds and convection currents and such keep the air stirred up constantly, so it may take 100-150 years for the CO₂ you are exhaling right now to make it back into mother earth, where most of it is currently locked up.

Now our puzzle is complete, and we can visualize the whole thing.

1. The sun heats the earth, repository of most of the CO₂ on the planet.

2. Some stored CO₂ comes out by a process known as outgassing ( from the soil ) and the champagne effect ( from the oceans ). The oceans are by far the largest source.

3. Sloppy "scientists" see the warming, and the CO₂, but overlook the changes in the sun, don't see the fine differences in timing... and proceed to blame the increasing temperature on CO₂and mankind as the culprit in a classic knee-jerk reaction.

Funny, any 1st Grader would have told us that if we had asked them "What makes the earth warm, Susie?" Nobody ever said science had to be "hard". You can demonstrate this with a simple kitchen experiment. Pour a glass of ginger ale, sit it on the table, and see how long it takes to go "flat" at room temperature. Now pour an equal glass into a pan and put it on the stove on low heat, then time how long it takes to go flat. That's your homework experiment - to demonstrate that extra heat really releases CO₂ a lot faster :-)>

Our satellites are pretty good at measuring overall ocean temperatures from afar, and CO₂ measurements are being taken daily around the globe. The best results we have been able to turn up so far is that measurable CO₂ increases appear about 9 months after an upswing in ocean temperatures. The data is messed up a bit every time a volcano decides to blow its top, because that's the mother of CO₂ producers, bar none. And a buffalo emits about the same amount of methane (CH₄) as driving your automobile about 8,000 miles - which can combine with O₂ in a highly exothermic reaction ( gives off heat ) to produce CO₂ and H₂O as end products.

One question that has been nagging us here at the Middlebury Community Network Science Center (our desk) is, "how in heck does one measure the "global temperature" in the first place"? If we asked you what your skin temperature is right now, you'd likely answer, "Where?" The temperature on your nose is likely far different from the bottom of your feet or other places you might measure. With the greater portion of the earth covered by water, and no floating temperature recording buoys every mile or so, how can we get an "average"? Well, satellites can measure ocean temperatures ( we'll talk more about that later ) but here in the U.S., for example there are only 1221 U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations, and our math shows that to be about one every 3,400 square miles.

And from that data, one can cherry-pick (as some have done ) to obtain any result he wants. For example, here are four records we cherry-picked from the whole dataset - note the temperatures are in Fahrenheit, not Centigrade:

Cornwall, Vermont temperatures appear to have slowly increased during the past century - about 1/2 °F ...time to break out the lifeboats.	Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on the other hand, had a temperature drop of about 4 °F Darn, they're stealing our skiers!

Berkley, California really heated up - a whopping 3 °F Must have been all those protests in the 60's...	Bucyrus, Ohio doesn't seem to have a ticket one way or the other in the Global Warming Game. Spoil Sports!

What's that straight line running through the annual average temperature readings?
The linear regression line obtained from the statistical output is the "best-fitting" straight line that can be drawn through the data. It is designated by the equation Y = b1X + b0, where X represents the year, Y represents the predicted temperature anomaly, b1 is the slope of the line and b0 is the Y intercept of the line. Now you know.

While we can joke about individual station readings, in fact there may be something skewing the data. Berkley, California, for example, was a sleepy little town back in 1857, when the data starts. Since that time, it has grown into a much larger city, with many miles of asphalt roads operating as near-perfect "black body" heat radiators. This is known as the "urban heat island" effect. Many Climate Scientists now seriously doubt the accuracy of even the 20th century section of the hockey stick.
Anthony Watts, writing in ICECAP, gives us a typical example: This NOAA USHCN climate station of record #415018 in Lampasas, Texas, was found to be tucked between a building and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town. While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region. In her survey, volunteer surveyor Julie K. Stacy noted the proximity to the building and parking, which will certainly affect Tmin ( the lowest temperature ) at night due to IR radiance. Daytime Tmax is likely affected by the large amount of asphalt and concrete in the area around the sensor.
You too can check the temperature history near your Grandpappy's home by accessing the Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations databank.

While Al Gore's Oscar and Nobel Prize winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, has serious students of climate change laughing their heads off, the British didn't think it was very funny. The British High Court has ruled that it cannot be shown to students without first having a disclaimer that it is "propaganda", instead of a "documentary". Those Brits just don't seem to have a sense of humor... or maybe they just think scaring little kids isn't an honorable pastime.

Nevertheless, the film makes a good outline for further discussion. Let's start with those poor little Polar Bears, taking their swim in the vast, empty Arctic ocean, just before they drown. Carole "CJ" Williams probably sums it up best, so we'll just quote her below..

Last March, global warming fanatic Al Gore used a picture of two polar bears purportedly stranded on melting ice off the coast of Alaska as a visual aide to support his claim that man-made global warming is doing great harm to Mother Earth. The one he chose, but didn’t offer to pay for right away, turned out to be a photo of a polar bear and her cub out doing what healthy, happy polar bears do on a wave-eroded chunk of ice not all that far from shore in the Beaufort Sea north of Barstow, Alaska.

The picture, wrongly credited to Dan Crosbie, an ice observer specialist for the Canadian Ice Service, was actually taken by Amanda Byrd while she was on a university-related research cruise in August of 2004, a time of year when the fringe of the Arctic ice cap normally melts.

Byrd, a marine biology grad student at the time, was gathering zooplankton for a multi-year study of the Arctic Ocean. Crosbie, who was also on the trip, pilfered the polar bear photo from a shared computer onboard the Canadian icebreaker where Ms. Byrd downloaded her snapshots; he saved it in his personal file. Several months later, Crosbie, who is known as an avid photographer, gave the photo to the Canadian Ice Service, which then allowed Environment Canada to use it as an illustration for an online magazine.

Today that photo, with credit given to photographer Dan Crosbie and the Canadian Ice Service, can be found all over the Internet, generally with the caption “Two polar bears are stranded on a chunk of melting ice”.

It’s a hoax, folks. The bears, which can swim distances of 100 miles and more, weren’t stranded; they were merely taking a break and watching the boat go by when a lady snapped their picture.

On Feb. 2, 2007 Denis Simard, a representative of Environment Canada, distributed that lady’s photo to 7 media agencies, including the Associated Press, and timed it to coincide with the release of the United Nations’ major global warming report in Paris, France on Feb 3rd. When the press called Simard in Paris to ask if it was his picture and could they print it, he says, “I gave them permission because Dan said it was his picture.”

Al Gore saw the picture shortly thereafter and contrived to use it in a presentation about man-made global warming that he staged at a conference of human resource executives on March 22, 2007 in Toronto, Canada.

With an enlarged version of Amanda Byrd’s polar bear picture on the screen behind him, Gore said, “Their habitat is melting… beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet. They’re in trouble, got nowhere else to go.”

Of course, after those words were spoken, the audience, being under the impression that polar bears are in imminent danger, gasped with concern and sympathy for the plight of the poor, pathetic polar bear population, whose diet, by the way, can include convenient humans, though attacks, like wolf-human attacks, are said to be rare.

According to Ms. Bryd, when she took the picture, the mother bear and its cub didn’t appear to be in any danger and Denis Simard seems to have backpedaled when quoted by Ontario’s National Post as saying that you “have to keep in mind that the bears aren’t in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes. You know what I mean? This is a perfect picture for