Dr. Weeks’ Comment: October was record cold in America. I was very cold just now in New York state visiting perhaps the world’s most fabulous mother in law, Lil. Despite unusually freezing temperature this early in the fall, she warmed our hearts with her loving presence despite no longer being able to recall any other aspects of her life except her favorite songs. It was early November and the snow surprised me. Today Nov 13th, the day after our loyal full moon once again shared her encouraging radiance, it is record cold at my friend Robert’s New Jersey home. Record cold also in Boston and Atlanta – in fact, record cold all across the USA.

What is happening with our climate? There are great disagreements and misunderstandings there is ample righteous indignation and name calling and there are skeptics whose scientific claims few want to examine. There is actually little scientific consensus despite claims to the opposite and there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth. The famous “hockey stick theory” claiming recent increases in earth temperature has been debunked as fraudulent science (bad math) but few climatologists know that. Contrary to the primary tenants of science, the creator of the theory Michael Mann refused to share his data so that other scientists like my friend Tim Ball might study as well. Mann was rightly discredited.

The polar bears are happy again and no longer drowning and no longer being used as a heart-rendering photo-op for those claiming the ice is melting. Sadly climatologist and professor Susan Crockford, my neighbor in Victoria BC, was fired because her research, while accurate, was …. lets say “inconvenient.”

CO2, one the villain and the reason for considering carbon tax, has been vindicated by NASA itself as a positive greening influence to aid life on earth. Granted, man pollutes in various catastrophic manners (Fukushima is still rendering the Pacific Ocean a radioactive soup of death 8 years after the 2011 catastrophe and illegal chem trails, though seen by all who look up in the sky, were formerly observed only by a few open-minded and open eyed should labeled “conspiracy theorists”, have indeed been clouding our sky in a criminal and foolhardy effort to reflect back into space warming solar rays. The CIA was proposing weather modification like this since 1965 (memo not released until 2003 when they coined the phrase “chem trail” in contrast to con trail (from condensation). Now Harvard and MIT scientists are coming out as chem trailers while disavowing prior knowledge of this geoengineering strategy. Now the chem trail efforts are main stream and being funded by Bill Gates to reflect back the solar rays as part of the  Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative.

Granted: Examples of humanity’s reckless stupidity are myriad but reasonable people must agree that natural forces like solar activity, polar magnetic shifts, geothermal activity and erupting volcanos are the real climate changers. As Hibbert wrote in Cosmos: “Earth’s cycles consist of both cold glacial periods – or ice ages – when large parts of the world are covered in large ice sheets, and warmer interglacial periods when the ice thaws and sea levels rise.”

Some scientists claim man’s effect on earth’s climate is relatively insignificant and playing only a minor role as earth goes through naturally occurring heating and cooling periods. These people, many of whom are world class scientists like Tim Ball also point out that fear of climate change can be used ask a powerful motivator for terrified people to sacrifice their of individual liberties for the common good – they point to the play book for this loss of freedom – Agenda 21.

For all that mankind does to effect climate and temperatures on earth, the sun primarily and other celestial bodies do far, far more. My astronomer friend George told me “Yes there is a solar minimum so we are all cold but the earth is warming up“. In the 1970’s we were told to fear a new ice, then by 1990’s we were told the ice caps are melting. Meanwhile our sun goes through cycles of temperature radiance and we earthlings respond.

To understand how things work, it is wise to follow the money trail. Climate change is big business. “What we need to remember is that anything that causes money to change hands is likely to invite corruption. Carbon credits do just that because, just like our money, they are created from nothing and sold.“

Can we trust our scientists? How reliable are scientific publications if science is now a matter of consensus and most funding is delivered by governments with political agendas? Let’s listen to Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989:

“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” –  Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989.

“When in doubt, ask the poet”. Wiser words perhaps have rarely been spoken.

I have always looked to poetry as I create perspectives on life issues. For your edification today, Robert Frost offered two doozies which climate watchers might like to bear in mind.

Good-by and Keep Cold

This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call
I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an ax—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.

AND

Fire and Ice 

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

What to do? Well, we should all start by remembering what we were taught in childhood: clean up after yourself. Leave the camp ground cleaner than you found it. Conserve energy and resources and “Live Simply so that others might simply live”.

FINALLY, a list of what we were told by the “experts” over the past 120 years just to put this all in context:

• 1895 – Geologists Think theWorld May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
• 1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
• 1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
• 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
• 1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
• 1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
• 1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
• 1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
• 1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
• 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
• 1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
• 1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
• 1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
• 1952 – “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
• 1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
• 1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
• 1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
• 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
• 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
• 1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
• 1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” –Washington Post
• 1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
• 1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times. Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

• 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
• 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
• 1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
• 1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
• 1989 -“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
• 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
• 1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
• 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
• 2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
• 2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
• 2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
• 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” —Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
• 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
• 2006 – “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” –Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
• 2007– “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
• 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program atNASA, see above for Hansen quotes.
• 2019 – Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” Update: Now Definitively Established to be Fraud