Gallaudet University and Global Warming

There's no better place to indoctrinate new and unsuspecting students on anthropogenic global warming claim by inculcating them (i.e. brainwashing) into the consensus agreement games in college courses instead of learning how to dissect critically such (mis)information. Long gone are the days at Gallaudet University during the late 2000s when "global warming" was on almost everybody's lips, er, hands. That sort of fervor has largely evaporated save except nowadays a few professors or courses that still teach the misinformation game instead of teaching students on how to acquire critical thinking skills to realize whether or not we have an "environmental crises" on a global scale all because we like to belch, "dangerous" CO2 gases! Gag them please!

HIS 323 Geography and the Environment (3)
This course is designed to survey the relationship between human impact on geography and the environment. By looking at different cultures and their values, examining urban and rural environments, learning about less developed and more fully developed nations, and by considering the role of race, religion and gender in human relations, students learn about the complexity of dealing with environmental crises such as global warming. In essence, this course will examine how changes in geography and the environment influence each other. By studying specific areas of the planet, students will be able to consider alternative solutions from those considered in the United States.

Now, if you think that consensus by the "entire global scientific community" has happened then let me tell you, it's already a myth thinking there's actually a consensus. That "entire global scientific" agreement on "global warming" or consensus came from a 2009 survey inquiry by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey that had two online questions submitted to some 10,257 Earth scientists where only 3,146 of them responded.

Here are the two questions:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels,do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

Out of all those Earth scientists that responded only 75 climate scientists said "Yes" to the number two question. (Doran, P.T. and M.K. Zimmerman (2009), Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3), 22, doi: 10.1029/2009EO030002)

Internet source: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009EO030002.shtml

Doran's paper: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

Doran commented in the paper:

"It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists." 

Again, this whole "consensus" thing is a myth saying that scientists mostly agreed that CO2 caused human emissions is the culprit on causing Earth to "warm up." Climate has warmed up many times. It has also cooled many times. In fact, the IPCC acknowledged in their latest 2013 second order draft report confirming that the sun's irradiance plays a huge role on helping Earth warm up rather than CO2. A shocking admission by the IPCC.

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

 As the leaker explains, this is a game-changer:

The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.

Indeed. All those years the students at Gallaudet University were unwittingly inculcated into the whole line and sinker that man was the sole reason for Earth's climate to warm up with the excess CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. A gas that plants and even algae that depend and thrive on. Yet, even former Gallaudet University assistant swim coach, Bill Snape, still believes the global warming theory/meme by buying recklessly into the Hurricane Sandy hype and scare.

First, any climate change conversation must highlight the steep price of inaction. Recent polls show that Americans are increasingly aware of the link between climate change and extreme weather. But that connection is still underreported and underappreciated – and absolutely critical to understanding why we must act.

Hurricane Sandy, the hybrid “Frankenstorm” now menacing the East Coast, offers an example of the kind of catastrophic storms we’re likely to see more of in a warming world. That’s because climate change has huge impacts on the hydrological cycle, increasing the risk of flooding and intense precipitation. That hydrological effect has a flip side: Climate change also increases the risk of events like this year’s horrific drought, which drove up food prices and brought down natural disaster designations on more than half the counties in America. Much of the globe is already suffering from climate change. One in every 100 humans on earth became a forced migrant last year, according to a new report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and climate change often worsened their plight. Thousands of Vietnamese, for example, are being driven from their homes by recurrent flooding in the Mekong Delta – a not-so-natural disaster created by climate-change-driven sea-level rise.

A little scientific education is in order here, especially for Gallaudet students and teachers who may still follow Bill Snapes' environmental global warming, global climate destruction, climate change  tirades where Bill gets it wrong on several examples seen here and here.

There is nothing to connect the so-called "Frankenstorm" to that of "anthropogenic caused climate change" because the number of hurricanes has not increased when in fact the number of hurricanes has actually gone down. In fact, we have gone the longest period since the Civil War without a major landfalling category 3 or larger hurricane to hit the United States. Just as well the number of tornadoes has not increased over the last 60+ years according to NOAA's data even though the number of U.S. tornadoes makes up 75% of all tornadoes around the world. Bill Snape simply does not make any sense and would rather appeal to emotions aimed at low information students and people gullible enough to take his words at face value without questions. In spite of the fact that Earth has NOT warmed up over the last 15 years when nearly one-third of all human emissions of CO2 has occurred since 1998.

As for the Mekong Delta that Bill Snape discussed it is known for its annual floods which are always a natural part of the environment that people expect to happen every year. In fact, for flooding to happen it requires 3 major factors to occur at the same time.  High flow discharge from upstream, continuous heavy rainfall and the high tidal flow from the East Sea that pushes against outgoing river water. The outgoing water in the Mekong Delta gets pushed upstream causing water to back up and spread out beyond the banks and flood the surrounding areas.  Ninety percent of the flooding stems from the high flow discharge from upstream and the high tidal flow from the East Sea that pushes the river water upstream causing the area to flood.  High tidal flow accounts for 30 percent of the flooding and a major reason why the Mekong Delta gets flooded every year, a natural event. Some years get some serious flooding (high floods) that have caused damage to property and lives lost. And that is attributed to mostly the tidal events rather than global warming or rising sea levels which has risen over 2 inches since 1993. People have adapted to this annual flooding to reduce fatalities and they have a motto: "Avoiding the Floods, Living with floods and Controling the Floods." They have for hundred of years learned to adapt to this natural yearly event.

Sorry, Bill Snape. Not much of the globe is suffering from the so-called man made climate change as you have tried so hard to scare people into changing. We will still have floods, tornadoes, wind storms, blizzards, excess rain, droughts, glacial ice changes, snowpack changes, and tidal surges. Climate change is a natural event that is influenced by much larger natural factors than man alone. I wonder, did any of the students at any time over the last several years ever stood up and challenged the prevailing notion about global warming on campus by professors and other people? Or did they just meekly sat in their chairs and nodded without fully understanding how things work? 

The moment you call people "deniers" means you have bought into the hype without the full understanding or knowledge of how things work and the fact that you are buying into the theory of anthropogenic global warming rather than on facts alone by using both misinformation and disinformation. The biggest giveaway is the use of hype and fear to cover up much of their lacking information that would've otherwise showed the opposite the understanding about climate change and that there are natural factors at work much larger than CO2 that influences our climate. Global climate is by far an extremely complex system. None of the climate models that have been used has ever accurately modeled past climate changes using CO2 as the forcing agent. That's problematic, folks.  The biggest and obvious most influential factor on our climate is our friendly sun located 93 million miles away with Earth located at the right distance, the various long scale periodicity, the right orbital path around the sun, the right amount of magnetic field around Earth, and the right amount of precision over time to make Earth an extremely livable planet. And that's just a few examples of natural factors that influence Earth's climate. No sun. No Earth. No people or animals. That's a fact.

Gallaudet University's Quiet Climate Change - Part II

This is a second round to my previous blog as I have something else to add. For the longest time I supported the idea of having a robust discussion on climate science.  Because of a politically driven agenda behind the term "climate change" it has become irretrievably tainted as a code word for "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW) rather than as both cooling and warming climates that is part of Earth's natural climate variability.

For this part II blog piece I'd like to continue my discussion of Bill Snape's 2008 video presentation that was presented at Gallaudet University.  He covered the Arctic sea ice in the beginning and presented a graph that showed a downward trend based on 27 years worth of Arctic sea ice data at the 9:46 time mark. He used an Arctic sea ice before and after satellite pictures taken in 1979 and 2007. Funny thing is that he said "30 years later" at the 2 minute mark referring the time difference between the two pictures which should've been "28 years later." The two satellite pictures he presented showed a large expanse of Arctic sea ice in September of 1979 and contrasted that with a much smaller expanse of sea ice in September of 2007 under the heavy pretext that the change in ice expanse was due to man's supposed additional introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere.

At the time of Bill Snape's presentation he had only 28 years worth of continuous satellite imagery and not 50, 100, 200, 500 or 1000 years worth of sea ice expanse data to see the highest and lowest sea ice extent over a longer period of time. It was simply not possible because satellite technology did not exist at the time. We're only seeing a very small window of time spanning a mere 28 years. That's not enough to make any kind of conclusion other than it's all naturally caused rather than man-made (induced). And then he said the most irresponsible thing that any self-respecting scientists would not do and that is to make a factual statement based on a hypothesis using only 28 years worth of sea ice coverage data that the reason for less ice coverage was because of global warming. He didn't say anthropogenic-caused global warming (AGW) but the whole pretext of his presentation is on global warming as caused by human beings. There's no doubt about that one. To the unsuspecting audience watching Bill's presentation they were most likely not aware that 28 years of data do no equate as an irrefutable proof that AGW is the reason when in reality it is much more complex than that with man's contribution hardly being the source.

Let's look at a time lapse video from 1978 to 2009 using that same Arctic sea ice data and you can see the continual contraction and expansion of sea ice over time.



Here's a video time lapse from 2000 to 2009 that's a bit more detailed and clearer.



In Bill Snape's presentation he showed a September 2007 satellite picture showing the Arctic sea ice at its lowest sea expanse. That was 4 years ago. Since then the expanse has not gotten any lower than 2007 if you look at the AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent graph (go here for an enlarged picture).

You can see that after 2007 none of the sea ice extent ever got lower than 2007. There's also NORSEX's graph to look at well.  With 33 years worth of Arctic sea ice data showed a slight downward trend and that's all it is, a downward trend with no idea of what that trend may have looked like prior to 1979 leading up to today. But we can see what it might have looked like prior to 1979 using other sources to gain a better idea.

Before 1969 six ships completed the Northwest Passage when it was ice free at the time. Earlier than that you had Roald Amundsen back in 1903 made his ice-free trip in the late summer month using his 70 foot long wooden fishing boat during his three year trip to find the "holy grail" Northwest Passage. That passage was ice free then when he discovered the route.  It was also ice free in the 1940s.

St. Roch had serviced RCMP posts and Inuit settlements in the western Arctic since 1928, but it is for her epic voyages through the Northwest Passage from west to east between 1940 and 1942, and the return voyage in 1944..

It certainly wasn't ice free some 13,000 years ago when we had glacial ice sheets that extended all the way to the northern parts of the United States (geographically speaking) before it began retreating as Earth gradually warmed up. That's an indisputable fact. Earth has warmed up since then with occasional mini ice ages.
You have historical, archaelogical, and biological examples and evidences so numerous they point to a very warm Medieval period from 1000 to 1300 AD. And that temperatures were estimated as high as 4 degrees Celsius warmer than today. Crops cultivated were done further north in Europe. Tree lines in the Alps were found to have grown 2000 meters higher than today's tree line elevation. Vikings were able to live on Greenland and even grow crops there before the cold climate returned and had to abandon their established settlements (this is true in the northern parts of Norway). Grapes were grown  for wine at one time as far north as southern Norway. Citrus fruits were once grown much further north in Asia than today. All point to a very warm period of time. All documented.

During the Holocene period studies have found trees that grew few hundred miles more north compared to today or that they found trees growing 1500 to 2400 feet higher in elevation in mountainous areas than today. All at a time when CO2 concentration was much, much lower, of course. Or go further back in time you had CO2 concentrations in the 1000 to 2000 ppm range where both plant and animal species thrived on land.

So, in retrospect, I have several concerns about Bill Snape's 2008 presentation to an audience that weren't exactly savvy in the field of science to understand enough the limitations of data and correlation exercises. The warming (and cooling) of Earth is not unprecedented. It has been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years, even when you have had natural catastrophic events occur such as volcanic explosions and meteor impacts which created dramatic climatic changes on a global scale in a very short time span.

On a closer time scale we have retreating glaciers of Garibaldi Park in B.C., Canada (map) where retreating glaciers revealed several thousand year old preserved tree stumps with their roots still in the soil. Trees that were once part of an ancient forest. An indication of a time when it was much warmer you had mature forest growing in abundance. The Warren glacier (one of many glaciers in Garibaldi Park) began retreating from it's maximum extent in 1705 over a span of almost 300 years to 2003 with recent photographic evidence starting in 1912.

Glaciers in Garibaldi Park have retreated and advanced several times over the last several thousand years which may be in fact tied to solar activity as an important if not main climate forcing mechanism.

Periods of advance in Garibaldi Park are broadly synchronous with advances elsewhere in the Canadian Cordillera, suggesting a common climatic cause. The Garibaldi Park glacier record is also broadly synchronous with the record of Holocene sunspot numbers, supporting previous research that suggests solar activity may be an important climate forcing mechanism.

Bill Snape, do you know what's scarier? To have an audience that isn't savvy enough to understand the limitation of scientific data and correlation exercises, and who are more easily swayed with cute pictures of polar bears with one person presenting only one side of the story that's theoretical in nature. For example, if you want to talk about correlation then tell me which of the two graphs shows a better positive correlation with global temperature change on Earth.


Picture graphs of correlation of Arctic Temperatures With Solar Irradiance (above) and CO2 (bottom).

Those graphs came from a 2005 study on the effects of solar irradiance on Arctic temperatures (Soon, W.H., "Variable Solar Irradiance as a Plausible Agent for Multidecadal Variations in the Arctic-wide Surface Air Temperature Record of the Past 130 Years," Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, 2005) where you can see that there is a much stronger positive correlation between temperatures and solar irradiance than with increasing CO2 concentration over time.

So, where I'm getting at? Well, a lot of things. One is the feeding of scientific information based on a theory such as AGW as if they were factual science and that all scientists have come to a consensus on this (they haven't). It's true that the Arctic sea ice has expanded and contracted seasonally but with only 32 years worth of data we are limited by what we can surmise why a slight downward trend on sea ice extent other than to say it's all part of the natural variability of climate change. It's certainly better than to make a giant sweeping statement saying man has indirectly caused Arctic sea ice or glaciers to retreat all because of a theory and not fact.

Bottom line, Gallaudet University students and staff need to ask real honest and hard questions and not be afraid to raise their hands say, "Excuse me,...." and ask direct, challenging questions and the need for more clarification.