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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Way Skeptical Thinking Works

















Many many years ago, I had a very good friend, someone I cared for deeply.  She was intelligent, funny, very kind and helpful, almost always (it seemed) in a good mood.  She did have one "flaw" however, although I use that word with compassion because it was the kind of flaw that is (alas) probably just part of human nature.  The flaw was a serious lack of skeptical thinking.  Why, I'm not certain.  She was easily intelligent enough to have it.  Perhaps it was her years as a member of the one true religion and acquisition of some position and responsibility in it that defeated her skepticism and left her a believer.  (To be fair, I was in this religion for a number of years too, but it didn't defeat my natural skepticism and I escaped in time.)

So much for overtures, because I want to discuss a specific event between her and me.  One fine day (all days in San Diego are fine days, until you get sick of it) she told me about her "theory" that the ancient Egyptians (and perhaps Mesopotamians) must have visited the Mayan and/or other Central American cultures.  Reasoning?  Both "ancient" cultures built large pyramids constructed of stone.  That was it; she offered no other reasoning, no other evidence or logic, in the "theory's" support.  She was probably as certain of it as she was of her religious truths.

If your mind is anything like mine's, and assuming you've heard this idea before, alarm bells were starting to clang in your head before you read this far.  If you have a reasonable knowledge of history and geography (shame on you if you don't!) you can just sense that there is something(s) seriously wrong here, that the pieces of this puzzle surely can't hang together.  To revive an old saying,  "You can feel it in your bones."

That was precisely my experience, and I believe it is essential for our skeptical abilities to mature.  Note that its main nutrient is knowledge, and not even very in-depth knowledge.  When anyone tells us something that feels (to confirm, yes, I believe this usually starts as an act intuition) out of synch with our own ideas and knowledge, it can make us startle as though we'd been teleported to a different world or time.  Of course, if your ideas and knowledge are incorrect, skepticism is pretty much in vain.

That's where it starts, I suggest, with that (often small) sense of dislocation, because it conflicts with at least something we know to be true.  But if you end there, you would rightfully accused of just dismissing the person without argument.  Furthermore, it would probably leave you with a funny feeling, as if you've failed yourself somehow.  And you would be right here too.  (Of course you can just make an agreeable grunt and change subject:  as I think Shaw said,  "Arguments are to be avoided.  They are always vulgar and often persuasive.)

Furthermore, there is always a real possibility of you being wrong, or not having enough facts at hand.  Or you can't summon all your defenses for the barrage of logical fallacies and cognitive biases about to assault you.

So I decided to file the issue away, to ruminate about it later when I was alone and could think clearly.  When I did, the objections to her "theory" came swiftly and completely enough.  I am not going to go over them (I am confident that you can find them yourselves quickly too).

So what happened to us, her historical speculations, and so forth?  Between us nothing, for I knew better than to debate a firm believer in the one true religion -- I did say I cared very much for her, didn't I?  Let sleeping cats sleep.  But for me, it was an important triumph of my mind, a victory I have always carried with me, knowing I may need it any time.  And don't doubt one thing:  life has that much richer for it.

Physicists and Archaeologists Tussle Over Long-Lost Lead

David Strumfels:  Even scientists practice inter-disciplinary conflict.
Roman mosaic from the 2nd century AD of a ship displaying similar hull shape to the Madrague de Giens wreck.
Image credit: via wikipedia | http://bit.ly/19mo34m,
Rights information: http://bit.ly/1lavRWo

By Peter Gwynne at http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2013/12/physicists-and-archaeologists-tussle.html A confrontation among ancient and modern studies is pitting particle physicists seeking concrete evidence of dark matter against marine archaeologists intent on preserving material in centuries-old shipwrecks.

The source of the issue: samples of lead used for anchors and ballast in Roman ships that were sunk up to 2,000 years ago and remain underwater since then.

The ancient lead's purity makes it invaluable today for shielding underground experiments designed to detect evidence of dark matter, the mysterious invisible stuff that, according to physicists, accounts for 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. But some marine archaeologists assert that, as a part of the world's cultural heritage, the lead should stay in place for detailed historical study.

"The use of these objects as stock for experimentation had never been an issue before," wrote Elena Perez-Alvaro, a doctoral candidate in underwater cultural heritage maritime law at England's University of Birmingham, in the university's journal Rosetta. "But now it is beginning to be deemed ethically questionable."

Both sides of the affair cite strong scientific justification for their use of the lead. "Underwater archaeologists and cultural heritage protection policymakers need to evaluate the value of this underwater lead for future generations," Perez-Alvaro explained. But the lead "is an essential element of state-of-the-art dark-matter searches," added Cambridge University physicist Fernando Gonzalez Zalba, who collaborates with Perez-Alvaro on studying the issue. "These experiments could shed light some of the most fundamental properties of the universe."

There's no shortage of the material. "I personally have seen dozens of lead anchor stocks during our expeditions in the Mediterranean and Aegean," recalled Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence Laboratory, in Massachusetts.

For archaeologists, studying those stocks has value far beyond understanding ancient metallurgical methods. The pieces of lead "are marked with indicators of where they came from," said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States. "That helps us to reconstruct ancient economies and global trade."

Physicists have inferred the existence of dark matter by observing its gravitational influence in distant galaxies. But they don't know what it consists of. Among the most popular candidates are entities called weakly interactive massive particles, or WIMPs.

Theorists believe that, although WIMPs are about the size of atomic nuclei, they scarcely interact at all with any other forms of matter. "Very occasionally one of them will bump into a nucleus and rattle it around a bit," explained Daniel Bauer, project manager of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS. "Our detectors are set up to measure the recoil of the nucleus when that happens," he added.

It doesn't happen often. "Nobody has yet had a completely confirmed sighting," Bauer said. Their detectors are sensitive to a rate of one incident per year.

Because the bumps happen so infrequently, CDMS has designed its experimental setup to minimize false positives. To avoid cosmic rays, the team has buried its detectors half a mile deep in a mine in Minnesota. It also shields them with copper, plastics, water, and, most important, lead.

"Lead is the material of excellence as a shielding material in radiation-rich environments," said Gonzalez Zalba, who does not work directly on dark-matter experiments. "Its low intrinsic radioactivity, good mechanical properties, and reasonable cost make it an excellent shielding material."

However, recently mined lead has one disadvantage. "Uranium and thorium that coexist with lead will leave a fair amount of the radioactive isotope lead-210 in it," Bauer noted. "In our experiments, even tiny amounts of radioactivity can lead to false signals. We want the purest possible material to shield the experiment from radioactivity."

That means lead mined a long time ago and preserved under water. "There's no chance that uranium and thorium are nearby," Bauer continued. "And since its decay half life is about 23 years, its radioactivity has basically gone." The ancient lead has over 1,000 times less radioactivity than modern lead.

The CDMS team bought its ancient lead from French company Lemer Pax, which had salvaged it from a Roman ship sunk off the coast of France. Later, the company "got in trouble with French customs for selling archaeological material," Perez-Alvaro reported.

"We assumed that this company was reputable, and I would believe that to be true," Bauer said. "They're still selling lead. That's the best evidence that everything is in order."

Another underground experiment, the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events in Italy, also uses Roman lead. A museum gave it 120 archaeological lead bricks from a ship built more than 2,000 years ago and recovered in the early 1990s off the coast of Sardinia.

Marine archaeologists don't want to deny physicists the use of the ancient lead. But they fear that such use could help to commercialize the salvage of ancient shipwrecks.

"It's another example of something from a shipwreck that has value and will encourage an approach to shipwrecks that won't be available for careful meticulous study. Science and archaeology go out of the window in the quest for profits," Delgado said. "The issue is the salvaging and selling of the lead; that's where archaeologists say 'Wait a minute.'"

The 2001 UNESCO convention for the protection of the underwater cultural heritage preserves the Roman lead and other ancient artifacts from any use that would damage them. "However," Perez-Alvaro explained, "there is no reference anywhere to the use of shipwrecks for the purpose of experimentation – new uses of underwater cultural heritage."

Nevertheless, archaeologists and physicists see opportunities for agreements that would protect the ancient lead's heritage while still benefiting dark-matter searches. "It's all right if it's been documented – like taking a bit of DNA and putting it in the DNA bank," Delgado suggested. "That's a respectable scientific process that benefits all branches of science."

Gonzalez Zalba agreed. "We follow the idea of 'salvage for knowledge and not for the marketplace,'" he said. "Dark-matter searches follow under the idea of research for knowledge. Therefore I believe the resources should be granted if required under the adequate regulation and archaeological supervision."

Perez-Alvaro calls for a formal route to regulation. "There is a need for dialogue between the two fields," she said. "Especially there is a need for a protocol [on the acquisition and use of ancient lead] set up by archaeologists."

"Archaeologists will always view as unethical the outright sale of artifacts recovered from cultural sites," Foley added. "But other creative solutions could be devised which would be win-win for physicists and archaeologists."

- Peter Gwynne, Inside Science News Service

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write ...

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Many people use the word "supernatural" without realizing that is an illogical oxymoron.  We don't know all laws about our universe, so what does the term even supposed to mean?  If a phenomenon can't be explained by existing science, then it is existing science that is inadequate, not nature in refusing to accommodate the phenomenon.
 
For me, the classic example is the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
Thanks to the work of brilliant scientists over 300 years -- Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Gauss, Priestly, Faraday, Maxwell, others I've embarrassingly forgotten -- by the end of the 19'th century science seemed to be complete to many people.
 
Not that there weren't unsolved problems.  The heat capacity of polyatomic gasses for one; modeling stable atoms with existing physics; the photoelectric effect; and the quandary of the "ultraviolet catastrophe" in black body radiation.  Worse, try as they could, scientists there simply could not crack these nuts, could not make any progress, using the known (and complete) laws of physics.
 
Imagine that you lived at that time and are a believer in the supernatural.  Why then, there's your answer!  The problems couldn't be solved by natural science because they above and beyond science.  They're the work of God, or some supernatural deity or ... or who knew what, but they must be beyond our comprehension.  Forever.  Bow down and say amen.
 
Fortunately for all of us, any science worth his PhD intuitively understands my first paragraph.  They realized that if the "known" laws of nature couldn't, however much effort, solve some basic physical problems, then the laws were either in some kind error or there must be more laws than we had so far discovered.
 
I'm not going to take us through history of quantum mechanics and relativity.  This is a blog, not a book, after all.  I will say that so much of our technology -- the Internet, computers, other electronic devices, many medical devices, others I can't think of right now -- would not be in our lives.  We would be living pretty much as people live 100 years ago.
 
Supernatural.  The lethal superfallacy of so much of history.  Let's rid ourselves of it as swiftly as possible.

Perovskite solar cells become even more promising with cheaper materials by Lisa Zyga

perovskite solar cells
(A) Cross-section schematic of a perovskite solar cell with copper iodide hole conductor. (B) Image of the complete device. SEM cross-section images of solar cells using (C) copper iodide and (D) spiro-OMeTAD hole conductors
 
(Phys.org) —Due to their rapid improvements in a short amount of time, perovskite solar cells have become one of today's most promising up-and-coming photovoltaic technologies. Currently, the record efficiency for a perovskite solar cell is 15% and expected to improve further. Although the perovskite material itself is relatively inexpensive, the best devices commonly use an expensive organic hole-conducting polymer, called spiro-OMeTAD, which has a commercial price that is more than 10 times that of gold and platinum.

In a new study, Jeffrey A. Christians, Raymond C. M. Fung, and Prashant V. Kamat from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana have found that copper iodide, an inexpensive inorganic hole-conducting material, may serve as a possible alternative to spiro-OMeTAD. Although the efficiency of perovskite solar cells containing copper iodide measured in this study is not quite as high as those containing spiro-OMeTAD, the copper iodide devices exhibit some other advantages that, overall, suggest that they could lead to the development of inexpensive, high-efficiency perovskite solar cells.

"The hole conductor is currently the most expensive part of perovskite solar cells," Christians told Phys.org. "Other organic hole conductor alternatives to spiro-OMeTAD have been investigated, but these alternatives still remain very expensive. This is the first reported inorganic hole conductor for perovskite solar cells, and is much less expensive than previously reported hole conductor materials.

This low-cost hole conductor could further lower the cost of these already inexpensive solar cells."
Perovskite solar cells, as a whole, are attractive because perovskite is a class of materials with a particular crystal structure that is the same as that of calcium titanium dioxide. This structure gives solar cells high charge-carrier mobilities and long diffusion lengths, allowing the photo-generated electrons and holes to travel long distances without energy loss. As a result, the electrons and holes can travel through thicker solar cells, which absorb more light and therefore generate more electricity than thin ones.

Although this study marks the first time that copper iodide has been investigated for use as hole conductors in perovskite solar cells, copper-based hole conductors have previously shown promise for use in dye-sensitized and quantum dot-sensitized solar cells. Part of their appeal is their high conductivity. In fact, copper iodide hole conductors exhibit an electrical conductivity that is two orders of magnitude higher than spiro-OMeTAD, which allows for a higher fill factor, which in turn determines the solar cell's maximum power.

Despite the copper iodide's high conductivity, the results of the current study showed that perovskite solar cells made with copper iodide hole conductors have a power conversion efficiency of 6.0%, lower than the 7.9% measured here for cells with spiro-OMeTAD hole conductors. The researchers attribute this shortcoming to the fact that spiro-OMeTAD solar cells have exceptionally high voltages. In the future, they think that the voltages of copper iodide solar cells can be increased, in particular by reducing the high recombination rate. The researchers calculated that, if they could achieve the highest parameter values observed in this study, the resulting copper iodide solar cell would have an efficiency of 8.3%.

The researchers also observed that the copper iodide solar cells exhibited another surprising advantage, which is good stability. After two hours of continuous illumination, the copper iodide cells showed no decrease in current, while the current of the spiro-OMeTAD cells decreased by about 10%. The researchers plan to further improve the devices in the future.

"We are currently working to understand the cause of the low voltage in copper iodide-based perovskite solar cells," Christians said. "With further work, we aim to increase the stability and improve the efficiency of these solar cells above 10%.

"The biggest challenge facing perovskite solar cells is long-term stability in a wide range of environments. The efficiency of the best perovskite solar cells is competitive with current commercial technologies, and they are potentially much cheaper. However, commercial solar cells must last 20-30 years with minimal degradation, and whether or not perovskite are capable of this type of long-term stability is currently an unanswered question."
Journal reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-perovskite-solar-cells-cheaper-materials.html#jCp

Have You Met Fallacy Man? Here’s How to Defeat Him.

David Strumfels -- This was just to precious to let go by.

Have You Met Fallacy Man? Here’s How to Defeat Him.

The following comic, which was first published last Monday, has been reprinted with the author’s permission. For more, check out his site, Existential Comics.
The Adventures of Fallacy Man
The Adventures of Fallacy Man
 
 
 

Paul Ryan’s Own Little Obamacare, By Sam Baker

Republicans’ Medicare plan would be wide open to the same attacks the GOP is aiming at Obamacare.


Paul Ryan's Medicare plan has a lot in common with Obamacare.

For Republicans, Obamacare is the gift that keeps on giving. Each day brings a fresh batch of horror stories of people losing their plans, getting cut off from their doctors, and shelling out more for premiums.

But had Mitt Romney won in 2012 and let Paul Ryan have his way with Medicare, Republicans would be on the other side of the fence, trying to defend a health care overhaul that produced a nearly identical suite of horror stories.

That's because, despite the political chasm between them—and though neither will admit it—Obama and Ryan are pushing similar policies in the bid to change the U.S. health system. Both rely on private insurance, sold through a competitive exchange, with help from a government subsidy.
And though they apply it to different populations, both programs share a fundamental conceit: They move a big group of people into the private insurance market. Both Obama and Ryan argue their overhaul would improve the country as a whole, but neither can escape the reality that in a shift of that size, some people will lose out.


And each plan's losers would have similar stories to tell.

Some premiums will go up

Insurance companies cut back on coverage or limit provider networks to keep premiums low. Lower premiums also will usually come with higher deductibles. This is pretty much how private insurance works, and that will be the case whether Obama or Ryan is expanding the market for private insurance.

The Congressional Budget Office has said seniors' costs would be higher under Ryan's model, though it has declined to provide a specific estimate, in part because the plan hasn't been introduced as a bill.
A Ryan-like plan that immediately affected current seniors would raise seniors' premiums by an average of 30 percent, and their total spending—including premiums, deductibles, and other cost-sharing—by about 11 percent, according to CBO.

CBO's estimate isn't an exact comparison to the Ryan plan, because it assumes changes would affect current beneficiaries—which Ryan's plan wouldn't. But liberal health care experts pointed to the report as an indication of how the Medicare program would be different once a policy framework similar to Ryan's was fully in place.

The House Budget Committee, which Ryan chairs, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Some people can't keep their doctors

Republicans have assailed the Affordable Care Act because many of the plans offered through its exchanges use narrow networks of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. Conservatives sharply criticized the White House after Zeke Emanuel, a former health care adviser, said that if you like your doctor, you can pay more to keep your doctor.
But, again, the same basic trade-off applies under the Ryan Medicare plan. The Ryan plan guarantees that seniors will have a subsidy big enough to buy a health care plan. But in most parts of the country, it won't be enough to buy traditional Medicare.
So, in order to choose that program—and its extensive provider network—seniors would have to make up the difference out of their own pocket. They could pay more for the plan that exists today, or they could switch to a cheaper private plan that would likely offer a smaller provider network, meaning they might have to change doctors.
Premiums for traditional Medicare would cost seniors about 56 percent more than they pay today, under the accelerated scenario CBO analyzed. About half of Medicare beneficiaries would buy private plans and half would remain in traditional Medicare, under CBO's model.

Losers, but different losers

Obamacare and the Ryan plan are similar, but it's important to remember their respective starting points. Obamacare is primarily covering people who have never had insurance before, and also requiring some people (no one knows exactly how many, but it's somewhere in the millions) to buy new policies. Ryan, meanwhile, would overhaul an existing program.
"With Medicare, you're talking about the whole 40-plus million beneficiaries who are going to have to make new choices and whose benefits and premiums are likely to be affected," said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which opposes Ryan's model for Medicare.
From a cost perspective, that means the Ryan plan has one especially big winner: the federal budget. The purpose of Ryan's plan is to cut federal entitlement spending, and it would do that. Overall costs, combining federal spending and seniors' costs, would also fall.
Obamacare launched a new stream of federal health care spending while the Ryan plan would shrink an existing one. That's a big difference. But both options would expand the market for private insurance, and therefore would expose millions more people to narrow networks and the other standard trade-offs of the insurance market. Both would inevitably mean some degree of sticker shock for certain people, and paying a lower price would mean giving up benefits.
"How it all works out is complicated, but that's another point of comparison with health reform," Van de Water said.

This article appears in the January 7, 2014, edition of NJ Daily.

To The Horror Of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here by Peter Ferrara

English: Ice age Earth at glacial maximum. Bas...

From David Strumfels:

Some notes before reading this article.  Looking into the future is always hazardous, whatever your prediction.  Furthermore, facts are usually messy, and sometimes can be used in opposition to a theory as well as support.  A good example is the very basis of anthropogenic global warming:  the  cyclic but overall warming of 1850-1900 to ~2005 correlates well with the anthropogenic CO2 rise from 280 ppm to almost 400 ppm, which shows no sign of abating (yet, because I believe it will).  But is it cause and effect or mere correlation?  Or some of both?  That CO2 is a greenhouse gas weighs, I believe, towards cause and effect.  But careful study of the data seems to me to show that much of the warming until 1970-1980 was more natural, a combination of effects Earth's climate has always lived with.  Only after the mid-late '70s does another effect exert more serious influence, and the only one I can think of is CO2.

My study of global temperature graphs also made a detail about it clear (although I'm not the first to notice it):  as I've just alluded, the warming is not straight-line, even with random variation making it messy.  Look at the cart below:


 
 
 
 











The lines make the cyclic nature of warming stand out, although by themselves, they do not prove it.  Have we studied earlier historic records to see if they stand up?  Honestly, I don't know -- but it's an important analysis if we can do it. But historical records are based largely on temperature proxies (ice cores, tree rings, etc., which are notoriously prone to scatter) and it may be impossible.

These cycles (they are, of course, not the straight lines as I illustrate them) have met with dismissal by most warming alarmists as statistical massaging, and they may prove to be right about that.  May be proved -- or may not.  As detailed, strongly agreeable temperature proxies don't exist for history or "deep time", such short cycles would never be found whether they are there or not.  My point here is that when it comes to climate predictions, I don't see where we even could have sufficient knowledge or understanding to make solid predictions, like a 95% the temperature will be 4-8 degrees higher than today (if nothing changes is sometimes added, as if nothing will change).

I might have been dismissive of this hypothesis too, if temperatures had kept climbing as they had done since the '70s.  But they didn't.  Starting around the 1997-2005 range (exact numbers vary, but I  lean toward the latter), the warming clearly stopped, leaving us in at least a holding pattern, or even with some mild cooling (a disputable claim).  It may be just a little blip, of course.  But it strongly fits in to the cyclic warming hypothesis, is almost exactly what we would have predicted if that hypothesis is true.  If it is true, expect up to thirty years of cooling before warming (if nothing changes, remember) resumes.  Since much will change, and has already been changing for ~20+ years -- developments in recyclable energy, replacement of natural gas over high carbon fossil fuels, the on-going efficiency improvements in cars, appliances, CO2 reclamation, etc. -- the CO2 trend must flatten out and perhaps even decline, perhaps starting as soon as twenty years from now although as always with making predictions I will not bet my fortune on it.  But by 2050 and later, I would make that bet (though I'll be 94 years old by then and won't have enough money if I lose).

I'll say no more and let Ferrara speak for himself.

Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.

Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.

Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.
Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.

The Siple Dome, an ice dome roughly 100 km long and 100 km wide, about 100 km east of the Siple Coast of Antartica, also reflects effects of the Little Ice Age synchronously with the GISP2 record, as do sediment cores from the Bransfield Basin of the Antarctic Peninsula. Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline between 1270 and 1475 A.D.

The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s. The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.

Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period from 1600 to 1800. Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods from 1270 to 1380 and from 1520 to 1670. Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile from 1675 to 1766, which continued into the 19th century.

The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana advanced until the late 18th or early 19th centuries. The last River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814. The Little Ice Age phased out during the middle to late 19th century.

The Little Ice Age, following the historically warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950 to 1250, has been attributed to natural cycles in solar activity, particularly sunspots. A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum began in 1280 and persisted for 70 years until 1350. That was followed by a period of even lower sunspot activity that lasted 90 years from 1460 to 1550 known as the Sporer Minimum. During the period 1645 to 1715, the low point of the Little Ice Age, the number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder. That was followed by the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states,
“Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 [the current short term 11 year cycle] is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.”

That is even more significant because NASA’s climate science has been controlled for years by global warming hysteric James Hansen, who recently announced his retirement.

But this same concern is increasingly being echoed worldwide. The Voice of Russia reported on April 22, 2013,

“Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

Faith in Global Warming is collapsing in formerly staunch Europe following increasingly severe winters which have now started continuing into spring. Christopher Booker explained in The Sunday Telegraph on April 27, 2013,

“Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record – according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.”
A news report from India (The Hindu April 22, 2013) stated, “March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to –25° Celsius in central parts of the country and –45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century….Weathermen say spring is a full month behind schedule in Russia.” The news report summarized,

“Russia is famous for its biting frosts but this year, abnormally icy weather also hit much of Europe, the United States, China and India. Record snowfalls brought Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to a standstill for several days in late March, closed roads across many parts of Britain, buried thousands of sheep beneath six-metre deep snowdrifts in Northern Ireland, and left more than 1,000,000 homes without electricity in Poland. British authorities said March was the second coldest in its records dating back to 1910. China experienced the severest winter weather in 30 years and New Delhi in January recorded the lowest temperature in 44 years.”

Booker adds, “Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations.”

Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, did concede last December that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That reflects grudging recognition of the newly developing trends. But that reflects as well growing divergence between the reality of real world temperatures and the projections of the climate models at the foundation of the global warming alarmism of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies. That is why, “In the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [global temperature]forecasts [of the Met Office] were too high — and… none were colder than [resulted],” as BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson wrote in January.

Global warming was never going to be the problem that the Lysenkoists who have brought down western science made it out to be. Human emissions of CO2 are only 4 to 5% of total global emissions, counting natural causes. Much was made of the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeding 400 parts per million. But if you asked the daffy NBC correspondent who hysterically reported on that what portion of the atmosphere 400 parts per million is, she transparently wouldn’t be able to tell you. One percent of the atmosphere would be 10,000 parts per million. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 deep in the geologic past were much, much greater than today, yet life survived, and we have no record of any of the catastrophes the hysterics have claimed. Maybe that is because the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, which would be well before any of the supposed climate catastrophes the warming hysterics have tried to use to shut down capitalist prosperity.

Gene

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