By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources
July 21, 1998
Mark Twain once said "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."
But of course he never met Bill Clinton, signer of the Kyoto treaty and supporter of sustainable development. With a perfectly straight face yesterday the president announced, "As you can see from this sweltering heat, the Vice President is right. The earth is warming. We are putting too many green house gases into the atmosphere with industrial age energy use."
With such a strong statement on the subject, I expected him to announce he was immediately turning off the White House air conditioning units. He didn't.
I think I have figured out why Bill Clinton says such incredibly stupid things. It's a generational thing. He comes from a baby boomer group who actually believed back in the 1960s that if you picketed or you protested about something, you were solving a problem. He believes that no one will notice that he hasn't PERSONALLY done anything that would solve the problem he is talking about if he merely makes a statement like, "we are putting too many green house gases into the atmosphere" thus, ipso facto, we have a heat wave. Just like magic.
Now, there were scientists back in the 1980s who warned that the late 1990s would bring a heat wave. They predicted it based on their observation of the SUN's behavior, not PEOPLE's behavior.
Before we rush to dismantle our culture, reduce our standard of living and embrace Al Gore's policies on "sustainable development", perhaps we need to look beyond the earth a bit and bone up on some old Scientific journals that predicted our current weather patterns almost a decade ago. In the May/June 1988 issue of Cycles magazine an article entitled: "When the Sun Goes Backward: Solar Motion, Volcanic Activity, and Climate, 1990-2000", by James H. Shirley, talked about solar events which would affect the weather in coming years. It said:
"An unusual 'solar event' will take place in the years 1990-1992. The Sun's motion relative to the solar system mass center will be retrograde, a condition that may be accompanied by unusually persistent climatic extremes." Roberta Soyars, who has lectured extensively in both South Africa and USA on this issue and is writing a book on the subject, states that the motion has taken place and that it actually began in 1989.
Shirley wrote, "A statistical evaluation suggests that the correlation in time of episodes of solar retrograde motion and major volcanic eruption is unlikely to arise by chance.
"There is reason to believe that the decade of the 1990's will be characterized by unusually persistent climatic extremes. Major explosive volcanic eruptions may occur. The possible consequences for society suggest the need for a greater investment in support of research to uncover the physical mechanisms and improve forecasts.
Shirley showed an illustration showing how the sun looped about the solar system barycenter in a counterclockwise direction. "This is the normal state of affairs," he noted, "at least over the past 13 centuries (Fairbridge and Shirley 1987.) However, very infrequently, something different happens. "Figure 3 shows the path of the center of the Sun in the years 1984-2000. In the current orbit, the Sun fails to loop the barycenter, instead falling short and looping out again. View B is an enlargement (x10) of the path near the barycenter. During this time, the motion is clockwise relative to the center of the solar system, the opposite of the usual case.
"What we are seeing here may be akin to the re-setting of a clock. Alternatively, we could compare this to the occasional "clunk" of a system of gears when one is missing a tooth, causing slippage at intervals. The hypothesis of a relationship linking the solar motion with the generation of solar activity implies that this event is likely to perturb magnetic fields and/or the flows of materials within the Sun, perhaps in important ways.
"I have presented a simple forecast model based on these mechanisms. The simplest statement that can be made is, if conditions in the 1990's are similar to those of the two previous episodes of solar retrograde motion, then societies will experience climatological extremes of a magnitude and persistence unprecedented thus far in this century. The scenario can be developed in a little more detail. We can expect to encounter:
"Increased frequency and duration of meridional circulation patterns, with associated climatic extremes of drought, flood, and other severe and unusual weather, along with, possibly, "Major explosive volcanic eruptions. Based on analog periods, these should occur principally between 1993-99. Some may be of immediate climatological significance, cooling the northern hemisphere after the manner of Tamora (Stothers, 1984; Kelly at al 1984.
"It has been shown that some eruptions cause climatic cooling, and this might independently account for the climate conditions (Porter 1981; Kelly and Sear 1984).
"The socio-economic and political consequences of a decade-long climatic change to conditions similar to those of the analog periods would be massive, though presumably not unmanageable if the situation were appreciated. We must invest in additional research to gain a better understanding of the systems and their interactions."
Last year Soyars asked, "So, what's been happening since that article was written? Quite a lot! Right on cue so to speak, the August 1989 issue of Astronomy magazine carried an article, 'The Day the Sun Cut Loose', by Gerrit Verschuur. To quote:
"Few people in the world realized it at the time, but during two weeks in March the magnetic field that cocoons our planet suffered an unprecedented assault of wave upon wave of energetic particles from the Sun. The onslaught culminated on March 13, when an enormous solar shock wave lammed into Earth's magnetospere with the force of a megaton bomb."
"The article goes on to describe some of the effects of this huge solar flare. There have been others since - a couple of notable ones this year, in fact. At the week-end of June 1, 1991, intense geomagnetic storms accompanied extremely large solar flares. Eruptions of Mt. Unzen in Japan, and Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines, immediately followed. There was, as predicted, a definite cooling of the Northern Hemisphere. Not to mention the tremendous floods of the past few years!
"In recent days volcanic eruptions of the Montserrat and Popocatepetl in Mexico were reported. 'I won't be too much surprised," Soyars noted, 'the eruptions of the volcano on Montserrat, and of Popocatepetl in Mexico, represent "straws in the wind", forerunners a much more such activity. Actually, volcanic eruptions (according to scientists) are an important part of what keeps Spaceship Earth hugging along! Mars has volcanoes, but they are inactive now. What stopped them? They don't know yet. The absence of eruptions, the loss of former oceans and no plate tectonics such as we have on earth, are believed to be at least some of the reasons that life no longer exists there, if indeed it once did.'"
Al Gore and his buddies at the United Nations seem determined to totally ignore the sun's role in climate extremes. Debates at the Earth Summit on the Environment in Rio in 1992 and in June of 1997 at the Earth Summit in New York, placed the blame for uncomfortable weather squarely on the shoulders of those who are determined to use such evil things as air conditioners and hair spray. The Sun got off scott free. Probably because they couldn't figure out a way to legislate against the sun.
However, these prior scientific observations about solar activity, and it's quite accurate predictions on the impact of the weather in the decade from 1990-2000 somehow never made the news. In fact, what DID make the news is the notion that somehow we humans, especially we American humans, who have achieved a higher than average standard of living are somehow responsible for all this unusual weather. Clinton re-verified that notion by his comment yesterday.
Somehow the "global warming caused by energy use" notion seems easier to sell to the public than a discussion of barycenters and loops in the Sun. However, while it might be hard on the old ego for the NOW generation bent on self-worship to accept, it appears that the scientists' studying the SUN'S behavior may be more accurate than those studying MAN's behavior. They accurately predicted the sun's slight change of orbit and its affect on the planet earth's climate.
Could it be that the sun, a body over which we have no control, is, as it has in ages past, changing weather conditions on planet earth? What exactly WAS the problem that caused the dinosaurs to become extinct? There were no humans to blame the problem on, and Al Gore had not yet been born to save the planet's climate. If, as my sister Roberta Soyars tells me, the demise of dinosaurs came about because of climate changes that took place sixty-five to sixty-six million years ago, could Al Gore have prevented it? Maybe by personally catching the comet or asteroid that scientists say created the climate change?
Soyars said, " It is now a well-known fact that there is a pulse to many, if not most natural events. Some pulses represent very long cycles of millions of years. There are, of course, cycles within cycles, down to and including lunar and lunar nodal cycles, which are now thought to have much to do with agricultural conditions. For instance, serious droughts in Southern Africa occur regularly in a 9.3 to 10.5 year cycle, yet always catch farmers by surprise!"
So far as the present heat wave being caused by "energy use" - I can remember a hotter cycle than this back in 1952. My first baby was about six months old and we were living in a two room apartment in Memphis, Tennessee. For weeks the thermometer read 105 degrees or more every day. There was no such thing as air conditioning for private homes back then and we didn't even have a fan. The night time temperatures exceeded 90 degrees, the humidity was very high and there was not even a little breeze - night or day.
What I had on my hands was a sleepless, crying baby and not very much experience. But, my husband had bought a convertible a couple of years before, so we would go for a ride in the middle of the night with the top down to get the baby to sleep. It worked and it was really quite romantic.
Another thing that Clinton said yesterday was we should "take advantage of the children's natural environmentalism to save our planet." While Al Gore, Bill Clinton and the environmentalists have succeeded in getting the children convinced that they are going to die because of environmental problems, getting today's kids to DO something about the environment won't be easy.
As one who still manages to survive without air conditioning in my house and office, I challenge Al Gore, Bill Clinton, the members of the Sierra Club and the United Nations to turn off their air conditioning this summer. If, as they tell us, solving the global warming problem will take some sacrifice, they should lead by example. Then maybe the children will follow them by also giving up their air conditioning, TV, constantly running CD players and computers in order to reduce "greenhouse gases
However, based on the kids I know, I don't think the kid generation is nearly as gullible as their baby-boomer parents. When I ask the kids if they are willing to cut down their energy use by curtailing their TV watching, CD player and video games, they just laugh at me.
To comment: mmostert@waveshift.com