Global Warming III - Listen Up!

I know some of my regular readers couldn't care less about this bear's alternative theories on Global Warming. I also know that those theories are far from politically correct, but anyone who knows me will be hard pressed to remember anytime Chester The Bear has been politically correct about anything. Swimming against the current is hard wired into my brain somehow (and believe me, there are times I wish it wasn't).

Regular readers of this blog will also know I've recently become obsessed with the whole global warming thing, mostly because I have a brain made out of straw and there are some arguments the doomsayers use that just don't make sense to me.

So before I get into my latest rant, let me recap, incase you were too disinterested to read previous posts...

Volcanic activity around the world has increased threefold in the last 300 years. From 1700 to 1799, there were just 34 "explosive cataclysmic eruptions". From 1800 to 1899, 41, and from 1900 to 1999, 69. Since 2000, we're running at 1 a year.

Around 90% (and maybe more) of the world's volcanic activity occurs out of site at the bottom of the deep ocean, in places called mid-ocean rifts. These are the cracks between the earth's plates where magma from the molten core oozes undetected out into the ocean.

The ocean rifts are so poorly explored that geologists have very little idea of the extent of activity. My suggestion was that global warming is more likely linked to this subsea heating of our oceans that the activities of mankind. Somewhat arrogantly, I thought I might be the only peson on the planet to have made the connection. Thankfully, I'm not, and there are some researchers with lots of letters after their names who've been looking at this for a while.

However, a few weeks ago, along came the UN and its report of climate change that "unanimously" layed the blame at human feet.

Unanimous? An alarm bell immediately went off in my head, an alarm so loud it drowed out the tinitus.

First, when was the last time you believed ANYTHING any government report anywhere told you?

More importantly, when was the last time you saw scientists unanimously agree on anything? The entire process of science is one of argument and counter argument, and is so unbelievably politicised that murders have been committed in the interests of defending one position over another. An eminent scientist will have a theory, and an equally credentialled scientist angrily shouts "bullshit". That is the history of science.

So, back to the point of this rant.

Global Warming Doomsayers point to the rapidly disappearing ice sheet as "absolute, irrefuteable proof" that the world is heating up, and with sweeping disregard for the rules of evidence, they always manage to tack "and human activity is to blame" on to the end of the sentence.

Really? Irrefuteable proof?

For the last couple of years, a team of American and German scientists have been looking at the Gakkel Ridge, a 5000 metre high volcanic ridge on the sea floor stretching from Greenland to Siberia, right under the Arctic Ice Cap. What they expected to find was little pockets of thermal activity here and there.

What they actually found was, to quote them, "surprisingly strong magmatic activity in the west and the east of the ridge and one of the strongest hydrothermal activities ever seen at mid-ocean ridges."

There were also far more hot springs on the seafloor than predietced. "We expected this to be a hydrothermally dead ridge, and almost every time our water measurement instruments came up, they showed evidence of hydrothermal activity, and once we even 'saw' an active hot spring on the sea floor," said Dr. Jonathan Snow, the leader of the research group from the Max Planck Institute.

Of course the bloody ice cap is melting. Try putting a big block of ice in a pot of water on the stove and see how long it lasts.

At the other end of the world, in the Souther Pacific Ocean, the rift between the Pacific and Nazca tectonic plates is 'speeding' apart at 15cm a year. That's 5 times the usual speed which means 5 times the amount of magma is oozing out of the middle of the world, which means 5 times the heat is going into the ocean.

And guess where the Pacific/Nazca Plate Rift is? Just near the Antarctic Peninsula, the place that's heating up faster than any other place on the planet. Really? Now wouldn't that be a surprise.

Finally, just last week, came some published research showing NO measurable change in either temperature or precipitation across the Antarctic Continent over the last 50 years. That has climate modellers baffled because in all of the we-did-it global warming models, Antarctica ought to be heating up. Band wagon scientists have been desperately trying to explain this anomaly away. It's important to them. Their next research grant probably depends on coming up with a good explaination, and in any event it's human nature to fit what we see into our model of the world and what we think we know.

Watch now, as the sub sea global warming proposition starts gaining momentum. This debate is far from over.