Tree ring studies confirm global COOLING, cast doubt on AB 32

Jan. 31, 2013

By Chriss Street

Global cooling? New studies of tree rings show that it’s happening.

Yet California remains governed by AB 32, whose official title is the “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.” It’s seven years later. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed AB 32 into law, is long gone. And the environmental movement, sensing that “global warming” wasn’t selling any longer, now calls bad weather “climate change,” as President Obama did in his Inaugural Address.

The prestigious Nature Journal recently published a major climate change study, “Orbital Forcing Of Tree-Ring Data.” It provided a thorough analysis of more than 2000 years of tree-ring evidence that showed current climate models substantially underestimated ancient Northern Europe temperatures levels during the Roman and Medieval Periods.

That temperatures have trended downward for the last two centuries debunks theories that anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is caused by a rising CO2 gas levels associated with industrial burning of “fossil fuels.” The main part of AB 32 mandates the reduction by 25 percent of California greenhouse gases by 2020.

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles in trees from Finnish Lapland, way up North.  In this extremely cold environment, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.  The international team was able to conduct high reliability calculations of tree-ring density from the Scandinavian pine trees preserved in the cold water. The tree rings correlated very closely with annual summer temperature patterns.

The United Nations-endorsed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for interpreting studies of ice cores and ocean sediments to “conclude” that Europe was about to suffer catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Cooling trend

But the new tree-ring data allow precise measurements of annual climate variability.   The results reveal there has been a cooling trend of -0.3°C (0.54°F) every thousand years “due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.”

The high-resolution graph shown above demonstrates that temperatures during ancient periods were much warmer than predicted by the IPCC.  The study also documented the extreme temperature phases that occurred during Europe’s “Little Ice Age” that resulted in a general cooling trend between the 1150 and 1460 AD, and the extremely cold climate between 1560 and 1850 AD.  According to lead researcher Jan Esper:

“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.… Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”

The results are a huge embarrassment to the IPCC, which has acknowledged it did not carry out its own original research to monitor climate and related phenomena.  But their extrapolated conclusions regarding a recent warming trend served as justification for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to demand Western industrialized nations implement the job-killing Kyoto Protocol treaty to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

And the text of AB 32 itself maintained:

“Global warming poses a serious threat to the economic well-being, public health, natural resources, and the environment of California…. The program established by this division will continue this tradition of environmental leadership by placing California at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”

‘Cooling trend’

In a direct broadside against global-warming doomsday alarmists, Esper noted:

“This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant.  However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia.”

The tree-ring study proves the recent warming trend we are experiencing is not exceptional, because current temperatures have been exceeded for at least two periods over the last 2000 years.

Paleoclimatologists describe the warming of the earth over the last 12,000 years as the Holocene inter-glacial of the current Ice Age.  The prior Eemian interglacial period, which began 130,000 years ago and ended 114,000 years ago, was much warmer.  At the time, the seas were 15 to 25 feet higher than today, Scandinavia was an island, hippos swam in the Thames River near the site of London and the raised beaches of Alaska and fossil reefs of the Bahamas were formed.

Just before the October 2011 unanimous vote by the the eight members of the California Air Resources Board  for California to be the first state in the United States to implement a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gasses emissions, Board Chairwoman Mary D. Nichols proudly hailed, “ We are staking out new ground in the battle against global warming.” The cap-and-trade program was implemented with CARB’s first auction last November.

But given the new tree-ring science showing AB 32 was based on faulty science, it appears she declared war on Californians.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
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