Review of
Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years
By S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006
260 pages, $24.95, ISBN 0742551172
With their new book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery skewer all the misinformation that has been used for so long in an attempt to convince society that mankind is the root cause of all global climate change.
The book is truly amazing! It meticulously supports, with hundreds of detailed, published references, the clear facts and conclusions that the Earth’s climate has been traveling a well-defined rollercoaster path of temperature change for at least 900,000 years.
Everyone reading this review should buy two copies of the book, keeping one in plain view at their home or office while sending one to a friend or government official who may be called upon to make a decision regarding CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.
An Inconvenient Antidote
In almost a point-by-point refutation of Al Gore’s unsupportable rant that “the debate is over; man is warming the Earth,” Singer and Avery explain technically but lucidly why nearly every cherry-picked fact in Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is contradicted by science, which weighs heavily in favor of a very different truth: Man is in fact all but irrelevant to global climate, as the sun and its accompanying solar system rule.
Anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming has been the scare du jour of the collectivist environmental movement, socialist countries, and academic money launderers for nearly a decade now. Unlike the past Y2K scare, ozone elimination, and avian flu, efforts to combat global warming will have long-term, serious, negative impacts on the citizens of the world, whose quality of life, especially in the poorest nations, will be disastrously worsened.
It will not be possible to read Unstoppable Global Warming without being convinced a sham is being perpetrated on society. Even a 30-minute perusal of the text will impress the average unbrainwashed person that despite Gore’s beautiful pictures of heaving ice flows in both his movie and book, man is not the culprit behind climate change. Singer and Avery’s well-chosen book title alone should give the thinking person pause.
Data in Ice Cores
In the opening chapter, “Is Humanity Losing the Global Warming Debate?” Singer and Avery explain how the ratio of two isotopes of oxygen allows us to date the age in which air bubbles were trapped in ice, and that with almost a million years of ice cores we can readily tell that periodic warming of the Earth has occurred persistently almost every 1,500 years.
That obviously does not square with efforts to get us to reduce our use of cars, air conditioners, and fertilizer in order to reduce carbon in our atmosphere. Technological advances have increased our life expectancy by 30 years during the past century, but now we are being asked to give much of it up and return to organic farming, which was able to support only 1.5 billion people 100 years ago.
If we gave up high-yield farming, as many global warming alarmists desire, we would need to clear all the world’s forests to sustain our current food demands, and thus eliminate about half of the world’s wildlife.
This brings up a key question: Do environmental zealots really care about the environment, or do they simply hate people? Singer and Avery make it clear: “Humanity and wildlife may both be losing the debate.”
Climate Cycles
Singer and Avery document the exhaustive data search they performed to confirm conclusively the existence of a 1,500-year warming cycle. They grappled with the 100,000-year elliptical cycle of the Earth’s orbit, the 41,000-year axial tilt cycle of the Earth, and the 23,000-year precessing or wobble cycle.
In addition to those cycles, they thoroughly document the most influential cycle of all: the 1,500-year solar cycle that drives most of the Earth’s climate cycle.
The authors shatter the greenhouse gas theory, making it clear humanity’s modest addition to the atmosphere’s small amount of carbon dioxide does not add up to a significant alteration in temperature.
In obliterating the Kyoto Protocol as a construct to change anything, the authors uncover a suppressed report from the federal government of Canada, which concluded that country’s expenditure of $500 million to reduce greenhouse gases was “largely wasted, producing neither a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions nor the development of new, cleaner technologies.”
Scaremongering Exposed
With merciless precision and incontrovertible scientific proof, Singer and Avery show mankind need not fear there will be sea level surges, devastating floods, the mass extinction of species, famine, drought, barren soil, more frequent and fierce storms, death by warming, and then an eventual sharp turn to killer cold.
One of my favorite chapters focuses on common sense regarding the extinction of species. The authors explain that most of the world’s animal species evolved 600 million years ago, so we know most of today’s species have successfully dealt with ice ages and global warming periods that have sent temperatures much higher and much lower than today’s temperatures.
Ulterior Motives Unmasked
Singer and Avery unveil the best imaginable view of global warming alarmists’ true objectives when they explain that what the Greens want is “to end or severely restrict the use of fossil fuels.”
Famous fear-monger Paul Ehrlich saw civilization self-destructing as a result of having too many rich people using too many resources. Following his lead, global warming alarmists want solar and wind energy because they are erratic and expensive, and they want organic farming because reducing yields by half will achieve a radical reduction in our capacity to populate the Earth.
Warming Benefits the Biosphere
In addition to disassembling the absurd scenarios of the anti-human zealots, the authors calmly present the logical lessons from history that provide so much cause for optimism. A case in point:
“Human food production historically has prospered during global warmings. … Warming climates provide more of the things plants love: sunlight, rainfall, and longer growing seasons. During warmings there are less of the things plants hate: late spring frosts and early fall frosts that shorten the growing seasons, and hail storms that destroy fields of crops,” Singer and Avery observe.
“Human food production today depends far more on farming technology than on modest climate changes,” the authors note. “We are no more doomed to famine by the Modern Warming than we are doomed to malaria in the era of pesticides and window screens. In fact, the food abundance the world has increasingly enjoyed since the eighteenth century is primarily due to scientific and technological advances.”
Dramatic Weather Events
Along the same lines, Singer and Avery look at history and confirm that the frequency and severity of hurricanes, droughts, thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes have not increased in recent years.
They point out, for example, that John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, in testimony before Congress, “noted that the most significant droughts in the Southwestern United States occurred more than four hundred years ago, before 1600. He stated that before 1850, America’s Great Plains were called ‘the Great American Desert,’ and experts at the time said the region couldn’t be farmed. Weather just seems unusual and dangerous these days, said Christy, because of the increased media coverage of major storms.”
Computer Model Flaws
The authors explain a subject few of us really understand–the global warming computer models that are used to scare the public on a daily basis. They are properly called Global Circulation Models, or GCMs, and they are the megastars of today’s climate and environmental research.
Unstoppable Global Warming is worth owning if just for chapter 11, which explains the limitations of GCMs quite clearly for folks without a deep scientific background.
Here is a sample:
“The GCMs are three-dimensional computer models that attempt to pull together and project into the future all major causes of climate change–jet streams in the upper atmosphere; deep ocean currents; solar radiation reflected back to space by ice sheets and glaciers; changes in vegetation; naturally changing greenhouse gas levels; eddies in the ocean that transfer heat laterally; number, type, and altitude of clouds in the skies; variations in radiant energy coming from the sun; plus hundreds of other factors.”
Singer and Avery explain in meticulous detail why these efforts are instructive on a pure research level but foolish as a guide for any precise decision-making, especially given how the models have failed to reproduce today’s climate accurately when inputting real-world data.
From cover to cover, Unstoppable Global Warming is truly elegant reading–so much so that I cannot wait to read it again.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is science director for The Heartland Institute.
