Rex J. Fleming, in the March 27 issue of the journal Environmental Earth Sciences, writes, ”The results of this review point to the extreme value of CO2 to all life forms, but no role of CO2 in any significant change of the Earth’s climate.”
This is a direct challenge to the current scientific orthodoxy that man-made carbon dioxide forms a shroud around the planet trapping heat and leading to a catastrophic, globe-wide warming. Fleming, a PhD meteorologist, is former director of the National Stormscale Operational and Research Methodology Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Many believe and/or support the notion that the Earth’s atmosphere is a ‘greenhouse’ with CO2 as the primary ‘greenhouse’ gas warming the Earth,” says Fleming. “That this concept seem acceptable is understandable – the modern heating of the Earth’s atmosphere began at the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850. The industrial revolution took hold about the same time. It would be natural to believe that these two events could be the reason for the rise in temperature.”
That would also be wrong, argues Fleming.
While not challenging that the planet is warming, Fleming offers an alternative that suggests the problem will cure itself, without massive, coordinated, world-wide energy disruptions. “The cause of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age,” he says, “was the solar magnetic field and cosmic ray connection.” He says that a strong magnetic field is a barrier to cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, clouds decrease, the plant warms. When solar magnetic fields are weak, cosmic rays can penetrated easily, low-level clouds form easily, increasing the Earth’s albedo and cooling the globe.
Countering the argument that CO2 is the warming culprit, Fleming says ice cores providing 400,000 years of data show that CO2 changes follow, don’t precede climate warming.
Fleming is also the author of a 2012 eco-thriller “Exposure,” which debunks the conventional explanation of global warming. It received a few, but glowing, reviews at Amazon.
No doubt that Fleming, who is far out on the fringes of the scientific consensus on global warming, will earn the wrath of the climate inquisition, led by Penn State’s Michael “Torquemada” Mann. Mann et. al. likely will demonize Fleming, as they do for all presumed heretics. Torture and burning at the stake are no longer available, so look for a troll campaign on Twitter and other social media.
Another prominent scientific skeptic of the conventional wisdom, University of Alabama Huntsville’s John Christie, has again surfaced with a new critique of the warming data. Along with Roy Spencer, they are the curators of NASA’s satellite temperature measurements. They have found and reported in International Jourmal of Remote Sensing that anomalies in the orbit of the chief satellite tracking climate temperature data in the late 1990s, NOAA-14, biased the temperature data it reported.
As the website Phys.Org reports, Christy and Spencer found that the wandering satellite produced a warming bias. Christy told Phys.Org, “We were looking at 39 years of a temperature trend, and this stray satellite affected the trend by about 0.05 degrees C (about 0.09 F). Over 39 years, that would be a total warming of about 0.2C…And this problem occurred, almost all of it, in the 1990s and early 2000s.”
The latest work by Christy and Spencer demonstrates that the “certainty” that pervades the conventional explanation of climate warming is far from certain, a point that the critics have long made, to little effect.
— Kennedy Maize