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FROM- Oregon Live

Heat wave, yes, warming, no

Don't let politicians and journalists hijack science

Even before our record heat wave subsided last week, politicians and journalists were ramping up their all-purpose explanation: "Global Warming."

Warming it was; global it was not.

When Portland hit 106 on Tuesday, it was 61 in San Francisco, 70 in Santa Barbara, and 79 in Los Angeles. Frequently-hot Pendleton was only 101, far from the record high for the Northwest of 119 set there in 1898.

Charlatans use every opportunity to promote climate hysteria, claiming that the global temperature is rising inexorably. Yet they overwhelmingly lack training in physics and meteorology. And the best satellite data show that the Earth as a whole has been gradually cooling for a decade.

They love "green science" because it is wonderfully suited to selling expensive climate "solutions" to the scientifically challenged. Never mind that it is neither green nor science, just politics. Never mind that climate variations are perfectly natural and unstoppable. An army of propagandists say that man is the culprit, and carbon taxes are the solution.

If President Obama's climate agenda passes, expect the problem to slowly fade -- because it never existed in the first place and few will tolerate escalating energy prices that dramatically lower our standard of living.

Real science is based on real evidence that can be independently verified, not on testimonials from those funded by politicians.

Real evidence of climate change is easy to find.

Real evidence that man caused it via greenhouse gases is completely missing.

Man does cause local warming through urbanization. This biases many terrestrial temperature records, providing fodder for alarmists.

The real causes of global climate change are variations in the Earth's orbit, in output from the sun, and in ocean surface temperatures.

Although Arctic sea ice extent has fractionally declined, global sea ice has shown no trend for 30 years; the Greenland ice sheet has thickened, the Arctic and Antarctic are cooler than 50 years ago; northern hemisphere winter snow cover reached its greatest in 2007; the Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 square kilometers; hurricane landfalls show no trend for 100 years; and tropical cyclone activity is at a record low.

This comes from a new assessment by prominent physicists. Previously, 31,478 scientists signed a petition objecting to global warming hysteria, including 9,029 of us with Ph.Ds.

The problem with allowing politicians and journalists to hijack science is not only that they might sell us economic disasters such as "cap and trade," but that we miss what is really going on: the Earth is cooling.

In addition to the atmosphere cooling, our oceans, which contain the vast majority of mobile heat on Earth, are also cooling. This is a stunning new development reported by the Argo array of ocean-conditions monitoring buoys and completely at odds with computer models. The Pacific Decadel Oscillation climate index has swung negative, the Atlantic is becoming cooler, and sea level has stopped rising. Our sun has been unusually quiet, and physicists from the National Solar Observatory predict subdued solar cycles well into the future.

Memorable heat waves occur in local regions because our oceans and atmosphere are never in complete equilibrium. In the 19th century, during the "Little Ice Age," a government ship anchored at Santa Barbara reported a temperature of 133 degrees, which became the record high for the United States for many years. That heat wave was likely caused by a Santa Ana effect, much like our heat wave last week.

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D., lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

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