Live Earth Follies

In the aftermath of the the excesses of the Live Earth concert (Get a grip please RFK Jr., too much French influence--"see you on the barricades"?!--or we'll need to barricade ourselves against you. Kind of unhinged. But maybe he means the Kennedy complex barricade at Hyannis. Bobby is a fierce Waterkeeper, after all.) IBD with some pithy remarks and some actual science:

While all this was going on, Eske Willerslev, a professor at Copenhagen University and the world's leading expert in extracting DNA from permafrost, was wondering what might be under the Greenland ice sheet that supposedly was melting as the guitars twanged at Live Earth.

So he drilled for samples in the center of the Greenlandic ice sheet, in southern Greenland, and beneath the John Evans glacier in Canada. At the southern Greenland site, according to sciencedaily.com, Willerslev found under kilometer-thick ice fossilized DNA of plant, animal and insect life perhaps 400,000 years old.

The fossil DNA indicated that much of ancient Greenland was a conifer forest teeming with butterflies, moths, flies and beetles. He found an environment very similar to eastern Canada or southern Sweden today. Or maybe even Aspen or Vail.

Willerslev also found that it has been 450,000 years since southern Greenland was entirely ice-free. It was covered with ice during the Eemian interglacial period 125,000 year ago when the climate was five degrees warmer than the interglacial period we live in now.

And here comes the Sun. There is some new evidence we should be preparing for a dangerous new period of global cooling. Professor R. Timothy Patterson, National Post:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.

These scientists drilled into the floor of fjords in the Canadian Pacific, collecting 5,000 years of mud in these stagnant, deep basins, and analyzed the core samples:

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

Patterson points out as this science is in its infancy it is premature to make draconican policy decisions, and goes on to say that the next major sunspot cycle will begin an era of global cooling, which will have much more impact than global warming, especially on those of us in northern climes.

The Sun and clouds matter more than our puny impact on the Earth.

We may not be looking at cows changing their diets, but at foraging for new sources for our own.

Dan Proft's reaction to the Live Earth follies.

Photo courtesy of the US Geological Survey.

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