Amelia Earhart Photo Debunked, But History Channel May Have Debunked Global Warming Concern

The History Channel special on Amelia Earhart this week fell flat with respect to finding the fate of the famed aviatrix, but, in addition to discrediting The History Channel, the special may have also helped debunk a major concern of climate change alarmists. The evidence for the survival of Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan was largely based on photograph. Ironically, it is a History Channel photograph that, if accurate, causes problems for the climate change crowd.

The “lost evidence” for Earhart’s survival consisted of a photograph that showed people who resembled Earhart and Noonan on a dock on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The History Channel’s assumption, based on the resemblance of the people in the photo to Noonan and Earhart, was that the pair had survived their last flight and were taken prisoner by the Japanese and later executed.

In a post on July 9, Japanese military history blogger Kota Yamano challenged the History Channel claim. Yamano said that an internet search for the picture revealed that it was taken too early to be Earhart and Noonan. The picture was originally published in a travelogue, “The Ocean's ‘Lifeline’: The Condition of Our South Seas,” in 1935, two years before the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan.

“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” Yamano said in an interview with The Guardian. “I was really happy when I saw it. I find it strange that the documentary makers didn’t confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That’s the first thing they should have done.”

There were other problems with The History Channel theory as well. The Daily Beast points out that when Charles Lindbergh made an emergency landing in Japan in 1931, he was given a hero’s welcome. The Daily Beast also cites a Japanese book from 1982 that detailed the story of a crewman on the Japanese navy ship in the picture. According to the testimony of Japanese veterans, the Japanese navy was instructed to join the search and rescue effort for Earhart. The ship’s log contains no mention of Earhart or Noonan.

Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937. At that time, relations between the US and Japan were still good. The attack on Pearl Harbor was four years away. Even though fighting in the Pacific predated America’s entry into World War II, the region was still largely peaceful at the time. Japan’s war with China began five days after Earhart’s disappearance with a battle between Japanese and Chinese forces at Marco Polo bridge in Beijing. At the time, Earhart disappeared, the Japanese had not motive to keep her rescue a secret.

The theory that Earhart went off course on her way to Howland Island and wound up crash landing in the Marshall Islands also strained credulity. The Marshall Islands are 1,000 miles away from Earhart’s intended target. To end up there, Earhart and Noonan would have had to fly to the vicinity of Howland Island, realize that they were lost, and then, low on fuel and disoriented in bad weather, fly past numerous other islands for another thousand miles.

On the other hand, Steve Milloy of Junk Science claims that a graphic used in The History Channel’s documentary undermines the argument for rising sea levels due to climate change. The graphic shows Mili Atoll, an island in the Marshall Islands, with markings that say “area between blue lines was shore in 1937.” The blue lines on the photo show a forested area in 2017. If the History Channel photo is accurate, Mili Atoll has grown since 1937 instead of getting smaller due to rising seas.

The History Channel documentary does point out that coral islands can change shape over time. A 2015 report by New Scientist found that, even if sea levels rise, many islands are rising faster.

If the History Channel expose’ was truly a bust on the scale of Gerado’s unveiling of Al Capone’s vault, what really happened to Earhart and Noonan? Sometimes the simplest and most obvious explanation is also the correct one. The pair were using primitive navigation methods to Howland Island, a small, isolated speck of land. The Pacific is a very big ocean and Earhart and Noonan are most likely at the bottom of it.

Read the full article on The Resurgent

The climate change conspiracy

Today we don our tinfoil hat to look at the issue of climate change. While climate change, previously referred as global warming, isn’t usually considered a conspiracy theory, it does share many conspiracy characteristics.

One obvious parallel between climate change and conspiracies is that proponents of climate change have made numerous predictions about the effects of climate change. Like predictions about martial law and FEMA camps, very few of these predictions have come true.

The numerous doomsday predictions of climate scientists are well-documented, although few media sources compare the actual climate events to the sensational headlines from between 10 and 30 years ago. Partial lists can be found in sources as varied as the Washington Times, Townhall.com, and Daily Tech. A more complete list can be found on WattsUpWithThat.com. These failed predictions include:

· In 1989, a senior UN climate scientist said that nations could be destroyed by climate change by the year 2000.

· In the late 1980s, Dr. James Hansen of NASA predicted that New York’s West Side Highway would be underwater in 20-30 years and that severe droughts would lead restaurants to serve water by request only.

· In 2000, Dr. David Viner said that snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Recent winters in both the UK and the US have set records for snowfall and low temperatures.

· In 2005, the UN warned that there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

· In 2007, scientists feared that Arctic ice would be entirely gone by 2013. Yet less than a decade later, ice coverage in the Arctic has dramatically increased in both thickness and area.

· In 2006, Al Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” that sea levels would rise enough to threaten Pacific island nations. This was merely one of many fallacies in Gore’s movie.

· In 2006, Al Gore said that we had “10 years” to act on global warming.

Like proponents of other conspiracy theories, global warming alarmists are undaunted when their predictions fail. Like believers in martial law and FEMA concentration camps, global warming proponents simply revise their theory to explain the delay and change the dates on their predictions.

Perhaps because of the inaccuracy of these predictions, the term “global warming” has largely been replaced by the more ambiguous term “climate change.” Climate change can be blamed for a number of weather phenomena that global warming cannot. While denying that cold weather is proof against global warming, proponents simultaneously blame both hot and cold weather on climate change. The Daily Caller and the Daily Signal have both compiled lists of things that alarmists attribute to climate change. As other conspiracy theorists twist news stories to fit their theory, climate change proponents also frequently find a climatological angle to events of the day. Some of the things attributed to global warming include droughts, Ebola, rape, and the Syrian civil war.

The term “climate change” probably also entered the vernacular because global warming apparently stopped about 20 years ago in the late 1990s. Climate scientists who disagreed with the “consensus” wrote as early as 2006 that warming had plateaued. No computer models predicted this pause in warming and climate change theorists initially did not even admit that it was occurring. Today the response ranges from denial that there is a global warming hiatus to adjusting theories to fit the new facts. Revising theories is true to the scientific method, but climatic computer models should be taken with a grain of salt until they can accurately predict future climate changes, rather than simply explaining what has already happened.

Recent revelations that 2014 was the “hottest year in recorded history” often fail to note that recorded climate observations only go back to 1880, notes Robert Tracinski in The Federalist. Also missing from the stories is that the increase in 2014 was 0.02 degrees Celsius, which is far less than the margin of error of 0.10 degrees Celsius. Rising sea levels can be explained by the fact that sea levels have been rising since before the 20^th century. In fact, a NASA graph shows that sea levels have been rising since the last glacial maximum 25,000 years ago. Rising temperatures and rising seas are both far less than predicted by global warming alarmists.

Although warming proponents widely believe that humans are contributing to climate change, they do not claim that this is being done purposefully to destroy the world. Where is the conspiracy that turns the theory of climate change into a conspiracy theory?

Alarmists might argue that the conspiracy comes from a conspiracy of oil companies to undercut climate change activists, presumably selling out the world’s future for short-term oil profits. To the alarmists, this excuses ad hominem attacks against skeptics, commonly derided as “deniers.”

The reality is that there is a proven conspiracy to silence climate change skeptics. In 2009, a hacker stole 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted them online. Another 5,000 emails were hacked and released in 2011. As James Taylor wrote in Forbes, the emails show that many scientists who contribute to IPCC reports engaged in deception and tried to conceal how weak the data supporting manmade climate change really was. Additionally, the emails showed that researchers were at a loss to explain both the recent global warming hiatus and the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period from the 9^th to the 13^th centuries when the Earth was warmer than it is today.

Alarmists use several methods to stifle dissent. A popular claim is that there is a strong scientific consensus on global warming and that 97 percent of scientists are in agreement. Joseph Bast and Dr. Roy Spencer found the 97 percent claim baseless when they examined it in a 2014 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In 2013, Forbes reported that a peer-reviewed study of earth scientists, engineers, and meteorologists found that only 36 percent considered global warming a crisis. The majority believed that global warming was a natural phenomenon and/or not a serious problem.

Many scientists may not want to publicly identify as skeptics. There are numerous reports of harassment of scientists and public figures who are skeptical of climate change alarmism. As far back as 2005, there were indications that skeptical papers were not being published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals. The bias against skeptical papers may well explain the small number of papers published by skeptical scientists. Earlier this year, NPR reported on harassment of skeptics by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.). Some, such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have called skepticism “treason” and called for skeptics to be jailed. In another recent case, Western Washington University students tried to have the college degree of self-proclaimed “climate agnostic” Doug Erickson, a state senator from Washington, revoked by the university.

The bottom line of the debate may be whether climate alarmists put their money where their mouths are. There seems to have been no exodus of wealthy, liberal, climate refugees from low-lying coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to higher ground in “flyover country.” In fact, in 2010 Al Gore purchased an ocean-view mansion in California. In Florida, people will learn about climate change – and irony - at the new Frost Museum of Science, a $300 million facility located in Miami at about eight feet above sea level.

 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Global warming and the blizzard of '11

Kids in Georgia got almost a week of sledding early in the year.

As Georgia digs itself out of a record-breaking winter storm that followed its first white Christmas in more than a century, people are starting to ask, “What happened to global warming?”  After a series of mild winters, Georgia is experiencing its second harsh winter in a row.  In the winter of 2009-2010, Atlanta received more than its average annual snowfall in one storm on February 12.  Ironically, this was my son’s birthday and his party at Chuck E. Cheese was almost snowed out!  There were several other snowstorms in addition to that one. 

The trend seems to be one of bigger snowstorms in Georgia that occur earlier in the season than in the past.  The trend seems to be one of harsher winters in many countries around the world, not just the United States. Records for cold weather are being set across the United States and around the world this winter.

As global warmists are fond of pointing out when cold weather strikes, local weather conditions do not necessarily disprove a global trend.  Unfortunately, many of these same people are quick to point to local heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes as proof of global warming in other parts of the year. 

As countries around the world experience record cold weather, as well as record hot weather, the term “global warming” has slipped out of favor.  Instead, it has been replaced with the generic term “global climate change.”  It is difficult to argue against global climate change because the global climate is definitely changing.  It always has been and always will be.

When considering the possibility of global warming, we should ask ourselves a series of questions.  First, is global warming actually occurring?  If so, is it a natural phenomenon or is it caused by man?  Whether is caused by man or not, is it a bad thing?  Finally, if it is bad and if it is caused by man, is it possible to reverse it?  If so, is it worth the cost?

Al Gore (Steve Jurvetson)

As far back as 2005, global warmists such as Al Gore claimed that there was a consensus that global warming was occurring, was caused by man, and would be catastrophic if not stopped.  More recently, this claim has been shattered, first as more and more scientists began to dissent from the prevailing viewpoint on global warming, then as hacked emails from prominent climate scientists revealed a pattern of deception.  Global warming believers had faked much of the data that proved warming was occurring, covered up data that did not match their conclusions, and tried to discredit scientists who were skeptical of their claims.

The warmist claim that recent years are the hottest on record was shattered several years ago when it was learned that NASA’s algorithms for graphing temperatures suffered from a Y2K bug.  Previously, 1998 was believed to be the warmest year on record for the US.  With the new data, 1934 became the warmest year.  As of 2007, five of the warmest ten years on record for the US were prior to World War II. 

Further, more doubt was cast on the data itself by the website surfacestations.org, which is conducting a survey of automated weather stations in the US.  Many were revealed to be improperly placed in a manner that could make their readings seem warmer than actual.  For example, some stations are located adjacent to asphalt parking lots or near the exhaust of air conditioning units.  If these types of errors are found in the United States, it is likely that they are also present in other countries, especially in the third world.

NASA image of solar flare striking Earth

If it cannot be conclusively determined that the earth is warming, it also cannot be said that it is beyond a doubt that warming is anthropogenic, or caused by man.  Another likely explanation is that global warming is caused by solar activity.  The sun is on an eleven year cycle that peaked in 2000 and reached a second peak in 2002.  Solar max is known to cause short-term climate change in the form of higher temperatures, increased clouds, and El Nino-like storms.  We are currently experiencing a very deep solar minimum, the deepest in over a century.  Solar activity has been at very low levels since 2008, which coincides with the onset of the harsh winters.  Historical data on cosmic rays shows an almost perfect correlation with temperature over a period of three thousand years.

On the other hand, the relationship of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with temperature is less certain.  Far from carbon leading historical changes in temperature, carbon dioxide levels actually follow changes in temperature.  According to historical data, carbon dioxide levels lag behind changes in temperature by about 1200 years.  On the other hand, scientists do seem to agree that carbon dioxide can act to amplify temperature changes that are caused by other variables. 

Further, increased volcanic activity may be contributing to the cold weather.  Volcanic activity has been known to affect weather since 1816 when an eruption on the Indonesian island of Tambora, coupled with a solar minimum, caused record cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere.  The year became known as “eighteen hundred and froze to death” and the “year without a summer.”  Failing crops led to food shortages in many parts of the world.  The dismal weather sparked emigration from New England to the American West and inspired Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein.”

Recent years have seen an upsurge in volcanic activity in some areas as well.  Undersea eruptions were revealed to be the likely cause of melting glaciers.  Last year, an Icelandic eruption shut down air travel across the Atlantic and Europe, stranding thousands.  In recent years, volcanic activity in Iceland has increased 30-fold.  As demonstrated by Tambora, it would not take a worldwide increase in volcanic activity to affect weather patterns around the globe.

2010 eruption of Icelandic volcano (Max Haase)

Additionally, yet another reason for warmer global temperatures may be that the world is still recovering from the Little Ice Age.  From 1250 to 1850, glaciers advanced and cold, wet weather led to diseases and crop failures.  As recently as 1862, during the Battle of Fredericksburg, the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) appeared in the skies of Virginia.

The link between warming and man is also tenuous.  For one thing, global warming has been reported beyond Earth’s globe.  The planets Mars, Neptune, Jupiter and Pluto have all been reported to have increasing global temperatures.  If global warming is a problem throughout the solar system, it would point toward a cause that is beyond Earth as well.  After all, there is little or no human industry on other planets.

The problems with global warming theory affect other areas of policy as well.  In 2008, polar bears were added to the endangered species list as a “threatened” species after a long campaign by global warming activists who were concerned that rising temperatures and melting seas could threaten the bear’s survival.  The listing led to a suit by the State of Alaska and countersuits by environmental groups.  The problem is that the polar bear population is actually increasing, something that is rare for a truly endangered species.  In some areas of the arctic, the number of bears is becoming so great that they constitute a safety issue for local villagers.

Are people a danger to polar bears or is it the other way around?

Contrary to what some warmists have claimed, current weather is not the warmest in history.  Climate during the early Pliocene Epoch (5.3 to 3 million years ago) and the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) (950-1100 AD) was much warmer than today.  Both periods occurred long before modern industry and manmade greenhouse gases.  In fact, the MWP coincides with the Medieval Maximum, a period of increased solar activity.

The MWP was warm enough to allow Vikings to colonize parts of Greenland and Newfoundland.  These colonies lasted until after the onset of the Little Ice Age.  Evidence of a warmer climate during the MWP is found around the world.

We can also examine the MWP to help determine whether global warming is actually a bad thing.  For example, agriculture flourished during the MWP when the “the climate was warm and dry, with high tree lines, glacier retreat, and reduced lake catchment erosion” compared to the numerous crop failures and famines of the Little Ice Age and 1816.  Further, the cold weather of these periods also caused the spread of disease, such as the Bubonic Plague (the Black Death), which killed a third of Europe.  Even today, cold weather is a bigger killer than hot weather.

Granted, a warmer climate would not be a boon to all areas of the earth.  Areas that are already warm might become too arid.  Sea levels would rise if glaciers melt, but even alarmists only predict rises of a few feet.  It is likely that much more land would be gained from the retreat of the ice, than would be lost.  Few global warmists were worried enough about the rising seas to oppose the rehabilitation of New Orleans, a city already below sea level.

The final question is whether global warming can be stopped by man and at what cost.  Environmentalist and global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, argues that proposed solutions for global warming will cost billions of dollars and only change projected warming by fractions of a degree. Lomborg argues that the money would be better spent on reducing third world poverty and fighting disease.  Humans are masters of adaptation and future generations, with the benefit of advanced technology, would be better able to deal with global warming.

The problem is compounded by the fact that developing nations do not want to be handicapped in their quest for a better standard of living by artificial limits on carbon production.  Large carbon producers such as China and Russia show little interest in cutting production of carbon.  If the United States were to enact cap-and-trade or some other type of carbon limits, we would effectively hamstring our economy. 

The best argument against global warming theory is the way the warmists have attempted to stifle the debate.  It has been years since Al Gore said, “There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this,” yet the debate is stronger than ever.  Scientists who are skeptical of global warming theory are painted as members of “a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters” and oil companies, allegedly destroying the world to preserve their profits.  As we have already seen, climate scientists dedicated to the theory of global warming have conspired to suppress data that contradicts their beliefs and fought to prevent papers skeptical of global warming from being published.  Global warming skeptics have been compared to Holocaust deniers and criminals.  A recent promotional video seemed to advocate summarily killing skeptics. 

Predictions of global warming are often based on sophisticated computer models.  To accurately model the earth’s climate and weather, they must take a large number of variables into account.  If these variables are omitted or applied incorrectly, the results will be useless.  To put it simply, it is a case of “garbage in – garbage out.”  In the past, the results of this modeling has been less than stellar, though models are improving.  The failure of climate science to predict the recent and current harsh winters underscores the difficulty of modeling climate.

If the science of global warming were truly as solid as its proponents would have you believe, there would be no need for these kinds of heavy-handed tactics.  If the global warming believers truly want to advance the cause of science, they should tone down their rhetoric and allow an open debate on the subject.  They might also want to find a better explanation for the harsh winter weather.

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Polar bear photo credit:
naturespicsonline.com Alan D. Wilson