Sunday, September 25, 2022

Secretary-General Guterres How Hot is a Burning Planet?

Over and over politicians keep saying our planet is on fire, burning up or will end in so many years, etc...

The last over the top exaggeration was from Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres on September 20th, 2022.

"A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning...

What is wrong with these people?

So I was talking to a guy named DS. We have known each other for a few years and he's worked for the government for the last 30+ years. Let's put it this way he will fly to Australia, give a brief and fly back due to security concerns. He told me that upon President Biden taking office everyone in his building was required to sign a document saying they would not publicly disparage the President or the executive branch in any way. Crazy how the Left says the Right is totalitarian when in fact the Left is doing what the Left has done for centuries.  

I digress... DS and I both agree the climate is changing and the Earth is warming. We both agree that ocean levels are rising but he thinks that's a good thing while I'm in the camp it's rising so slowly as to be a non-issue and warmer in man's history has always been better.

Years ago I gave up trying to determine the Earth's temperature. The problem is fraught with scientific manipulation and is more an art form than science. I wrote a blog that showed eight of the most prestigious scientific organizations all coming up with different global temperatures.

It's hard to believe but none of them were the same. The range of global temps differed by up to .55 degrees Fahrenheit. FYI that's a lot! That's right I couldn't find a consensus of the current global temperature let alone a future global temperature and yet the science is settled.

If the scientific community can't agree what the temperature is now why would anyone think they can agree what the temp will be in 30, 60, 90 years? Thus I went looking for something else to help me determine if the climate was changing because of man.

I concluded the data we currently collect was inconclusive at best and too easily manipulated or as NOAA would say normalized. So how do you measure the worlds temperature and man's input in a way that is definitive and not subject to manipulation? 

Above all I'm looking for a measurement that can't be "normalized" and finally I settled on Sea level rise.

Why?

Because try as "they" might scientists can't normalize or fudge historical written tidal records that go back thousands of years all over the world let alone records that can be reconstructed to the last ice age maximum over 20,000 years ago. Bottom line, tidal gauges don't lie. More heat less land ice and more water in the oceans thus the oceans rise. Even more responsive is warmer oceans equal higher ocean levels because water expands as it warms.

Result of my study.

The world has recorded directly or indirectly ocean levels for the last 20,000 years. More than 600 years of station data are confirmed to still exist in paper form from the America's and Pacific nations alone. For the last 450 years sea level rise has been consistent and doesn't show signs of "ramping up" which indicate man's contribution to the world's CO2 levels has yet to increase the temperature of the planet in a "bad" way.

If you engage a climatologists and ask them to point out the "signal" of man's contribution to climate change it invariably becomes an interesting conversation. Not the knee jerk reaction that the world is burning but a more nuanced discussion of the greening of the planet, feedback loops, solar radiation cycles, Earth's orbital changes, water vapor, clouds, cosmic rays, deep ocean cycles, etc...

So is the world warming? Absolutely, technically we are still in the Palestine ice age and have very recently (geological time) seen the melting of the massive continental glaciers. My study indicates that for the last 450 years sea levels have been rising more or less consistently at 8 inches per 100 years. 

More importantly since 1950 the slope of this rise has not shown ANY increase. As of yet the slope does not show an upturn or better yet a non-liner swing up showing that man hasn't yet made a measurable impact upon the planet. Furthermore, like my friend DS I will be happy to see an uptick because a warmer planet has historically been a more productive planet and maybe my home in Maine will eventually have food wagon's and ice cream vendors year around.

In summery, ocean level rise is well documented for thousands of years has been steady for the last 450 indicating, Antonio Guterres notwithstanding the world is NOT burning up.