DADvocate

A Russian scientist, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, believes the Earth is beginning a cooling phase not a warming phase.

Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

Emphasis added.

My 14 year old son will be delighted to find that the world is cooling. Last week he went snowboarding at Perfect North Slopes in Indiana, a mediocre but convenient and reasonably ski resort. He had a blast and can't wait to go again.

Sorokhtin who is a Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and a staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute, goes on to give an explanation of processes involved in global warming and cooling. His explanation jives much better with I learned in college geology than the claims of Gorism.

True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary.

Rather, the presence of CO2 is the result of warming not the cause.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

It is abundantly apparent to anyone who has taken intro geology (and paid attention) that the Earth went through dramatic climatic fluctuations before the existence of man and since. It is also abundantly apparent that Al Gore needs to be in the public limelight. He needs to see himself as a significant leader and a modern day prophet. Underneath everything he does is a driving, compelling need to be THE ONE. Gore is closer to a cult leader than anything else, and a very good one at that.


Sorokhtin leaves us, or at least those pesky Europeans, with some words of comfort.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.