Don J Easterbrook
Western Washington University, USA
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Geol Geophys
Adherents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim that CO2 emissions by humans will cause catastrophic warming, temperature increase of 6-10??F, killer heat waves, extensive crop failures, massive famines, melting of polar ice sheets, drowning of major cities by sea level rise of 3-20 feet, disappearance of snow and glaciers, and many other calamities. But how realistic are these predictions of doom and gloom? This paper will present data bearing on all of these issues. Can CO2 cause global warming? CO2 can absorb infra red, but the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is so miniscule (0.040% and only 3.6% of greenhouse gases) that it is not capable of causing significant global warming. During the recent warm period (from 1980 to 2000), the increase in CO2 was only 0.008%, not enough to have caused the warming. There has been no global warming in the past 18 years even though CO2 has continued to rise during that period. Are polar ice sheets melting? Temperature measurements from satellites show no warming in Antarctica in the past 37 years and ground measurements show no warming since 1955. Are major cities in anger of drowning from rising sea level? Sea level rise has been relatively constant at about 7â? per century since 1850. Claims of sea level rise of 3-20â?? by 2100 are impossible because there is no source of water for such a rise. Even during dramatic melting of 10,000â??â??thick continental ice sheets that covered much of the Norther Hemisphere in the late Pleistocene, sea level rose only 3â?? per century. What does the future hold? The past is the key to the future. Recurring climate cycles over the past 500 years and entering a Grand Solar Minimum both strongly suggest that the Earth is headed for a period of global cooling, similar to the cooling of the 1970s, not global warming.
