The Delusion of Glabal Warming

[subgenius]

http://www.eutopia.no/Pawels.htm#Warming

http://www.eutopia.no/Contents.htm

The Delusion of Global Warming <span style="color:#33CC00">( OOOPS I TYPO"D GLABAL IN THE TOPIC )
An excerpt from the anthology titled AIN'T SO STORIES
by T. B. Pawels - 1998

At the end of the Middle Ages, the North Atlantic was warm enough for Viking colonists to establish farms on Greenland.

During the Renaissance, the European population starved as a Little Ice Age reduced agricultural crops, and colonists in New England endured extremely severe winters into the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. During the second quarter of the Twentieth Century, heat and drought turned North America into a dust-bowl. The third quarter began with satellite photographs showing the Polar snow expanded by ten percent, and geophysicists were talking about another Ice Age.
How quickly Chicken Little changes her screech; the last quarter of the Twentieth Century has scientists, politicians, and the public believing the world lowlands will soon be inundated by rising sea level when global warming melts the Polar ice.


The media made headlines of a report from a scientist at the University of British Columbia who computed that the surface of the ocean cannot absorb all the greenhouse gasses emitted by industry; civilization as we know it will be under tidewater when the Polar ice melts. Equations only paraphrase the premises; calculating the absorption of the sea surface is a mistaken premise. The ocean does not absorb gasses any more than our skin absorbs air; it is the infinite surface of dew, mist, clouds, and rain that absorb the greenhouse gasses, and they are exceedingly soluble. The warmer the atmosphere becomes at sea level, the more water is evaporated for rain. The surface of the clouds is so great that it is impossible for industrial gasses to accumulate into a runaway greenhouse effect. Acid rain kills the life it falls on, and dissolves rock to carry salts to the sea, where they are consumed by sea creatures and deposited as beds of limestone and gypsum. Deep beds of these salts are evidence of massive
greenhouse emissions in past geological ages. Glaring mistakes don't matter in the popular media; everyone joined in the latest Children's Crusade, and hysteria is whipped up by prognoses as rabid as the warnings against cannabis, cholesterol, and Cuba.

Without any parade of science --- or funding --- everyone can see for themselves whether the climate is warming by looking at the timberline on snowy mountains. A rising timberline is proof positive of a warming climate --- along with a northern drift of agricultural crops. Whether the climate is warming is not the point; the alarms about the consequences are downright mendacious.

Every schoolchild knows scientists are not telling the truth when they warn that global warming will flood coastal lowlands, because sea level cannot possibly rise when the Arctic ice melts; Archimedes Law of Displacement prohibits it. The Arctic ice pack floats on the Arctic Ocean. Floating ice displaces its weight in water. As the floating ice melts, it becomes its weight of water, which is exactly the same volume as it displaces. Therefore, it is impossible for the melting Arctic ice pack to raise sea level. Float ice cubes on a glass of water brim full, and see for yourself as they melt. Don't mistake condensation on the outside of the glass as overflow.

The ice pack on the Arctic lowlands is removed from the ocean, so sea level goes down until it melts. At this time in geophysics, all the snow and ice falling on northern lands melt in the summer, so the sea level is restored by autumn, more or less.

The expanse of Antarctic ice is mostly floating, so Antarctic shelf and drift ice can't possibly raise sea level when they melt, either. Instead, sea level rises as ice flows from the Antarctic Highlands to float on the ocean. The flow of Antarctic ice from the Highlands to the sea shelves is driven by the weight of new snow. Ocean warming increases fresh precipitation; the water vapor that snows on Antarctica is removed from the ocean --- to lower its level. Global warming can only accelerate the hydraulic cycle without changing sea level.

The industrial greenhouse gasses cannot possibly melt the Antarctic ice cap. Air temperature falls by five degrees Centigrade for every thousand metres of altitude. The average temperature on the Antarctic coast does not rise above freezing during the heat of January. Therefore, the Antarctic interior never rises within fifteen degrees Centigrade of melting in the hottest weather. The Antarctic Coast must warm at least twenty degrees Centigrade, and the summer must last at least three months to melt the winter's snowfall, never mind melt three kilometres of ice accumulated over the eons.

The Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rockies is a frozen lake covering about three-hundred square kilometres under a mile of ice. The ice can melt only from the surface. The ice does not melt in thirty degrees of heat in the Alberta summer because its surface is twenty-five-hundred metres above sea level, like Antarctica, where Canadian mountains retain snow all year. The glaciers flowing out from the Columbia Ice Field are not retreating a hundred metres a year because the summers are warmer; they are melting back because the precipitation is less; there isn't enough new snow flowing out from the frozen lake to replace the melt-back in the warm valley below. Precipitation has been declining during the middle of the last century because the northern ocean climate was getting colder.

Scare mongers say the thermal expansion of the ocean is enough to flood coastal lowlands. Everyone who dives in the ocean is familiar with the thermocline found between three and ten metres deep, depending on the latitude, beach, and waves.

The ocean is cold below the thermocline because Polar waters sink. Only the surface of water is warmed by the atmosphere; below the thermocline, the ocean gets cold --- and colder to deep ice water. Therefore, only the top ten metres of the tropical ocean will expand by global warming. You can see for yourself how much the ocean will rise during ten degrees of heating by filling a pot with water to a depth of ten centimetres, mark the waterline, insert a thermometer, stir, and watch; multiplying the thermal expansion by a hundred yields the loss of beach property at Hawaii.

A continent under three kilometres of ice stores a lot of cold in the winter. The cold stored in the Antarctic ice cap produces an outflow of cold air that keeps the Antarctic Coast below freezing all summer. Only a warm ocean current around the Antarctic continent can possibly bring enough heat to the South Pole to melt the Antarctic ice cap. Warm ocean currents cannot penetrate the Southern Ocean because the melting sea ice covers any warm saltwater to keep the Antarctic coast cold. Antarctic cannot possibly warm up enough to melt until it melts down enough for the Southern Ocean to warm up.

Other respected scientific authorities, who might be retained by the tobacco industry now that there are no more Atlantic cod to be counted, warn that the Antarctic ice pack will melt at the bottom and slide off the continent to drown world coasts under the greatest splash since Daryl
Hannah flapped a fish tail. In fact, the weight of the Antarctic ice pack keeps the bottom melted, but the ice pack cannot possibly be floated from the land to spill into the ocean unless the water under the ice is two kilometres deep; the law of buoyancy cannot raise the Antarctic ice to slide off the continental shelf until ninety percent is submerged.

Furthermore, the weight of the ice pack depresses the Antarctic continental rock into the underlying plastic mantle in which it floats. Because an ice pack can melt only from its edge, the depth of the Antarctic ice increases from the coast to the interior. As a consequence, the continent is depressed deepest under the centre, and not at all along the coastline.

Since the average rock is three times heavier than water, the center of the Antarctic continent is depressed one kilometre, and the bottom of the ice pack is below sea level. Antarctica is a saucer holding its ice cap within a raised edge so that it can't possibly slide into the ocean.

Every schoolchild knows that a hot climate does not produce deserts --- or else there could not be any tropical rain forests. What atmospheric warming really does is increase the temperature gradient of the global heat motor. As a consequence, there are more storms, and storms of greater violence. Instead of heat and drought, there are more cloud cover and rain. Winters and summer are extended to unseasonable lengths because there is more energy driving warm air north and cold air south. Furthermore, the heat raised by rain generates hurricanes and tornadoes. Anyone who goes outside to see whether it is raining knows that this is what is really happening.

Geologists tell us that the entire world enjoyed a semitropical and temperate climate until two million years ago. In fact, the northern latitudes were not tropically hot as the winters were not intemperately frigid. It is the winters, not the summers, that restrict the range of tropical life; palm tress will grow in Iceland's summer as long as they are not frozen in winter. Suddenly, for the first time in geological history, ice accumulated thousands of metres deep over half the northern latitudes. Many hypotheses are published to explain the sudden advent of the Ice Ages, each believed with religious fervor by its hucksters.

In my childhood, the hypothesis favored by respectable scientists was global cooling as a result of Solar cooling. The Earth happens to be situated at the exact distance from the Sun, with exactly the density of atmosphere to support water at the freezing point. As a consequence, the slightest variation in Solar radiation will cause the permafrost to move
up and down the Terrestrial latitudes. It only stands to reason.

A recent hypothesis gaining market share is a meteor striking the Earth, and raising enough dust to freeze the planet under unending night. For thousands of years of ceaseless meteor storms? Well, it can't. Dust absorbs more heat than air, so the upper air temperature must warm, and that warmth is returned when the dust settles. Rain washes the atmosphere in a few years, and nothing increases rainfall so much as dust.

A spin-off from the meteor hypothesis is a sudden axial shift. A look at a global map finds the center of the last Ice Age located in Greenland. It only stands to reason that the centre of the Ice Age had to be on the North Pole; therefore, Greenland had to be on the North Pole during the last Ice Age.
Either the Pole moved to bring summer back to the Northlands --- or Greenland did. They overlook the fact that once the Pole is supposed to cause an Ice Age, there must always be an Ice Age around the Pole, wherever it is.

The solution to the mystery of the Ice Age is not in Singularly Anomalous suppositions of Solar fluctuations, cosmic collisions, and axial shifts, but in the fluid mechanix that transfer heat from the Tropics to the Polar regions. The driver of Ice Ages is the complex interactions of currents distributing heat around the world, the currents of the atmosphere and the mountains they encounter, the currents of the oceans and the undersea tectonics that direct them, and the currents of magma that carry the continental plates to open and close oceans.

The ocean is the planet's heat bank. It is not possible for an Ice Age to become established on open ocean unless the Tropics freeze. As long as most of the world is covered by ocean, and the ocean covers the Polar regions, surface currents will keep the Polar regions warm enough to prevent an Ice Age; an open Arctic Ocean will keep the Arctic lowlands as warm as Scotland. We can infer, therefore, that until two million years ago, the Pacific extended broadly to include the Arctic Ocean as a great boreal bay, and the Japanese Current kept the entire Northern Continent in a temperate climate.

After North America split from Europe, distance decreased between Alaska and Siberia, and then the Aleutian Islands raised a sill to close the Arctic Ocean from the Japanese Current.

Meanwhile, Arctic outflow stops the Gulf Stream from penetrating beyond Murmansk. Once landlocked, tropical currents can't reach the Arctic Ocean to keep it from freezing. The Aleutian Islands started the Age of Ice.

An Ice Age begins when Arctic cooling permits the rest of the world to warm. As a result, the entire planet becomes a titanic refrigerator driven by heat. Loaded with water vapor, warm Atlantic air chills when mixed with cold Arctic air, to dump precipitation in a neverending deluge. The Ice Age is an Atlantic phenomenon because the prevailing Pacific winds drop their moisture on the Pacific Cordillera before deluvian snows can reach the continental interior. Far from the warm ocean currents, the Canadian Shield, Greenland, Northern Europe, and most of Siberia accumulate snow faster than it can melt in summer until they are inundated by a frozen sea..

Frozen to the bottom of its basin by the weight of accumulating ice, the Arctic Ocean literally rises a kilometre to cover the northern continents within its expanding coastline.
Although heat reflected from the ice sheet reduces global temperature, the tropics become warmer by the heat longer flowing to the Poles. Warmer tropic water increases the Polar precipitation, so the larger the ice sheet grows, the more it grows --- and it grows faster. Meanwhile, the increasing warmth of the Japanese Current keeps Eastern Siberia and
Alaska free of ice.

The cold stored in spreading Polar ice extends winter until snow falls the year 'round, as it does on Greenland. As a result, the larger the continental ice sheets grow, the larger they grow --- and they grow faster. As the ice flows south into the temperate latitude, it steepens the temperature gradient along the Arctic interface to generate more storms, more violent storms, and heavier snowfalls. As a result, the larger the continental ice sheets grow, the more they grow, and they grow faster. As the frozen Arctic Ocean rises over the land, it reaches altitudes where no ice can melt; the surface reflects Solar heat to reduce the global temperature, while heavy clouds around the coast cools the temperate latitudes. As a result, the larger the ice sheets grow, the more they grow --- and they grow faster.

The continental ice sheets stops the flow of all northern rivers. The Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena Rivers freeze solidly, and so do the Mackenzie and the Nelson-Saskatchewan; the Columbia and the Volga are shortened to their lower reaches, while the Danube carries torrential meltwaters.
The ceaseless deluvial precipitation raises the northern rivers kilometres over their banks, but all the water is frozen, so the rivers never drain. While the water from northern rivers are held in ice, the surface of the ocean become warmer to release more water vapor to snow on the Polar regions; the larger the ice sheets grow, the more they grow --- and they grow faster.

Eventually, the ice reaches forty-five degrees of latitude where it is warm enough to melt the year 'round, regardless of the cloud cover and the cold air flowing down from the high interior heights. The rising tide of Arctic Ocean ice stops along that temperate coastline. Arctic ice would still cover the northern half of the northern continents if the melting coast did not switch the fluid dynamics freezing the North.

When the frozen ocean is stopped by warm latitudes, all the water of the northern rivers held in ice flows south from the melting edge of the ice sheets, releasing the millennia of hyperprecipitation in a few decades. The melting Arctic Ocean floods the Great Plains and the Steppes; aerial photographs over the western American Plains reveal gigantic sand
ripples left by the last glacial flood. The Mississippi covers the Midwestern States, and Appalachia becomes an island between a meltwater sea and the saltwater ocean. All the waters of Eurasia which do not flow into the Baltic drain into the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean Sea becomes a freshwater river between Europe and Africa, carrying thousands of years of Siberian floodwaters through the Straits of Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, and Gibraltar, in a few decades.

Because freshwater is lighter than salt, all the warm ocean currents are covered by ice water. As a consequence, the ocean surface cools, and the sea air cools. Since cool air cannot hold so much water vapor as warm air, the cloud cover dissipates, and the incessant snow stops as suddenly as it began. As you see, a teady process develops switches to satisfy both
Catastrophism and Gradualism without planetary violence.
Sunny skies heat the continents, and hot summers melt the ice sheet. The more the ice sheets melt, the faster they melt, increasing the flood of frigid meltwater keeping the ocean surface cold. Cool sea air becomes dehydrated as soon as onshore winds blow over hot continents, turning coastal regions into cold deserts, while the interiors of continents are dried by heat waves. And thus we find that ocean cooling ends the Ice Age begun by ocean warming.

As the continents are relieved of permanent ice, the rivers begin to flow north again, allowing the Atlantic surface to warm. Once the Arctic outflow diminishes enough for the Gulf Stream to reach the Arctic Coast, the entire cycle starts over again --- just like a refrigerator.

Ten-thousand years ago, the last Ice Age began to melt, covering the world ocean with a hundred metres of ice water. Five-thousand years ago, the flood of ice water abated to let warm tropic currents reach the Polar latitudes, and make the shores of the North Atlantic comfortable for human habitation.
The warm phase peaked out a thousand years ago; since, then, the Northern climate has been on the cusp of switching, wavering warmer and cooler from one century to the next, before perpetual snows set in again to bury the continents under the next Ice Age. This century is warming in reaction to the Little Ice Age of the Sixteenth Century, but even as the northern
seas are warming, glaciers are growing on the Pacific Coast.
A few decades of increasing snow will render Canada, Siberia, and Northern Europe uninhabitable again.

While writing for the Apocalypse, we can only wonder what scientists will pick to excite the next hysteria.