Dr. Judith Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. She once
told a journalist, “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible.”
She added, "Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies,” she charges. “If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a stooge of Donald Trump, a quasi-fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.”
The climate models used by scientists working for the United Nations cannot explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age.
Curry notes that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming cannot be blamed on CO2 emissions because the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were relatively small in those years. Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.”
Speaking of climate changes, she points to natural factors, of which there are many. These factors reveal far greater complexity than is generally acknowledged by global warming alarmists.
The following organizations are in agreement that climate changes: the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academies of more than 30 other countries, the American Association for the advancement of science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), The American Institute of Physics (AIP), The Geological Society of America (GSA), The American Physical Society (APS), and the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
However, among the scientists in these organizations there is a range of positions as to which factors contribute most to warming. All tend to agree that solar radiance and Earth-Sun geometry are very significant. Yet we hear about this less than we hear about the danger of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel energy sources.
Earth's climate varies from region to region and from age to age. Therefore, it is misleading to speak of "climate change". Instead, we should speak of "climate changes" over vast periods of time. The
Pleistocene glacial epoch (2,600,000-11,700 years ago) saw substantial variations in the extent of glaciers and ice sheets. These variations were driven by changes in the distribution of solar radiation across Earth’s surface. The insolation pattern is strongly affected by the geometry of Earth’s orbit around the Sun and by the orientation, or tilt, of Earth’s axis relative to the direct rays of the Sun.
Worldwide, the most recent glacial period, or ice age, culminated about 21,000 years ago in what is called the
Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). During this time, continental ice sheets extended well into the middle latitude regions of Europe and North America, reaching as far south as present-day London and New York City. Global annual mean temperature appears to have been about 4–5 °C (7–9 °F) colder than in the mid-20th century.
The
Sahara was once wet, and with on-going reforestation projects and changes in monsoons, it will likely be wet again.
At its peak, Mega Lake Chad covered more than 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), making it the largest lake on Earth today.
Researchers identified two distinct
environments at the South Pole at the close of the Permian Period. There was a warm rainforest with tree-ferns, palm trees, and baobab trees at the lower elevations, and a cooler mountainous region dominated by beech trees and conifers.
NASA bases climate change on a 136-year record.
According to NASA, 16 of the 17 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998. What happened to make 1998 different? This marked the completion of Earth's axial precession, a cycle of about 25,800 years (Earth's Great Year). Obviously, we have no climate records going back that far.
In the cycle of Earth’s Great Year, the line off the North Pole axis (extending toward Polaris) scribes a complete circle in the heavens about every 25,800 years. A complete cycle takes between 25,000 and 28,000 years, depending on the amount of Earth's wobble. One cycle is Earth’s Great Year. Climate and atmospheric changes appear to become more acute toward the end and beginning of a new year.
Judith Curry is not alone in her consideration of natural causes. In June 2013, Dr.
Roy W. Spencer wrote, "Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change…yet they now, ironically, have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!"
