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Terrible things are happening. The warmth of spring arrives earlier, the chill of autumn happens later, and glaciers are in impressive retreat worldwide. Winters are milder and Jamestown, VA no longer freezes to -40° like it did at the turn of the 1600s. Canada may yet have a northwest passage. Crops around the planet are suffering repeated record yields. Dire need and massive imposition of jackbooted State compassion in counterpoint, less 80% overhead, are threatened with extinction. God is most displeased when His revenues are compromised by the universal joy of full bellies.
Sunspots are cooler darker areas than the overall stellar background. They are surrounded by faculae that are hotter and brighter. Energy emission varies as the fourth power of absolute temperature. Look at 1% cooler and 1% warmer to see what happens for equal areas of emission.
(0.99)4 = 96.06% (1.01)4 = 104.06%
If it were 96.06% and 103.94% things would balance. In the real world, the more dark sunspots there are the more energy the sun emits overall because of coupled faculae. It sums to a fractional percent increase of the overall solar constant. It recently pushed the temperatures of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Earth a tiny bit higher. It is called "Global Warming."
The warmest day of summer is not 21 June (August is brutal) nor is the coldest day of winter 21 December (try February). There is a lag between energy input and temperature distribution. A changing solar constant is so delayed in effect. If we do nothing, the "hottest years in 500 years" from the 2000-2002 explosion of sunspots will disappear. If the sun stays quiet as expected, Global Warming will vanish and the new Official grief will be an impending ice age.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are purchasing a Nobel Peace Prize. Carter and Arafat won the Prize for bringing peace to the Middle East (dancing in pools of other's blood without slipping). $(US)70 billion burned to ashes will buy a spot at the head of that queue. Science 312(5782) 1894 (2006). Replacement reproduction is 2.1 surviving kids/family. Japan has 1.33; Africa has 8+. How will the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation "saving Africa" not doom the whole world including Africa?
(We all know that giving 850 million Africans condos and SUVs will cripple their reproduction with long term debt. It worked for the US middle class! Birth control is a lot cheaper and faster. It works tomorrow not someday.)
Al Gore says my grilling a rib-eye steak exacerbates Global Warming. He has massive outputs of climatological extrapolations to prove it. Wait 100 years and watch it happen. I eschew manifold sheaves of differential equations with hundreds (thousands?) of adjustable parameters crunching in supercomputers. I offer two lines of arithmetic in counterpoint.
Four billion Third Worlders doing heavy labor (no Wal-Marts) metabolize 3500 Calories/body-day. A metabolic Calorie is 1000 gram-calories. Summed heat issuing from their flesh is
(4x109 bodies)(3500 Cal/body-day)(1000 cal/Cal)(365.242 days/year) = 5.11x1018 calories/year.
Add daily cooking fires, slash and burn agriculture, and stock animal metabolisms to obtain a larger, truer number. Ice at 0°C masses 0.917 g/cm3. 80 cal/gm melts it into 0°C water. Third World body heat annually melts
(5.11x1018 cal)/[(80 cal/g)(0.917 g/cm3)(1015 cm3/km3)] = 70 km3 of ice.
Greenland's ice cap between 1993-1994 and 1998-1999 lost at least 51 km3/year of ice on the average, Science 289(5478) 428 (2000). Whose fault was that - with another 20 km3 loss/year in excess to thin Arctic ice?
Al Gore sells books imagined but not written. He is technically incompetent and ethically irresponsible. His Inconvenient Truth is a politicized lie.
The Carbon Tax on Everything is government revenue enhancement. It will collapse First World economies and not couple to the Global Warming "problem" short of major national depression like Ford's and Carter's stagflation. You do not drive to work if you do not have a job. Who produces the pelf when everyone is a consecrated beggar?
Atmospheric CO2 reduction is a straw man. It disappears by planting tens of thousands of square miles of new forest. When that wood matures, harvest it and build wood frame houses to sequester carbon in cellulose for another 50+ years. Replant the forests. Planting huge numbers of trees in suburban areas costs a few dollars/taxpayer and then only once. What kind of a government program would that be?
US Enviro-whiner policy is to discourage wood frame houses. Brazil is destroying the Amazon jungle as fast as it can chainsaw trees and burn brush. Farms must massively grow sugar cane for Brazil's "ethanol economy." The soil is exhausted in three years and they cut deeper into the Amazon for new land. How renewable is that resource? It must be a government program - it is exactly the wrong thing to do massively subsidized in the worst possible way.
Do Brazilian chainsaws run on ethanol or gasoline?
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