![[]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhQAgo8OcxHnKTsWDdQvzg7GjzliORs8NMQpEOokW6MgKkbkSiXOhOjxCgQtg5tTjTfL1iIa_qXmF8ZRc96rbivx6FqfYZ7ojIcW0vNuU7NV9AcFJlQDo1ctfhtauFAmCdHge8RmmqbWVRuGX5c811SYsXKnJOd9EG5FesDjZKR7LhZsdcXe_XSuiZh5QSTt-8f=s0-d-e1-ft)
Kim Jung Un had NO military experience whatsoever before Daddy made him a four-star general.
This snot-nosed twerp had never accomplished anything in his life that would even come close to military leadership.
He hadn't even so much as led a Cub Scout troop, coached a sports team, or commanded a military platoon.
So he is made the "Beloved Leader" Of North Korea.
Terrific!!!
Oh crap! I'm sorry...
I just remembered that we did the same thing.
===
This Sharyl Attkinson report (Rescue Interrupted part 1) from Sundays' Full Measure reveals more about Obama and Hillary's failures on the night of the Benghazi attacks than the new movie, "13 Hours". To see Rescue Interrupted part 2 go to the Full Measure home page.
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Take a coffee break and watch the future….it’s here now.
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If you think about it, Trump is the creation of a failed Obama presidency. Obama created voids, frustration, fear, has been an abject disappointment/failure and the vacuum has been filled by Trump. Why Trump? Well it is simple. Obama is a liar and Trump is a boaster about things that he may not be able to solve but has proven he understands. Much of what he has predicted or discussed has actually come to pass giving him some credibility.
Furthermore he has said what so many are thinking but afraid to say because of PC'sim having gripped/crippled our nation.
So, those who voted for Obama, who could not read the tea leaves because they were blinded by the shine off his teeth and his speechifying can now thank themselves for Trump.
It is just that simple.
My Louisville daughter just sent me the book by the author of this article, Dennis Ross, who seems to be singing a different tune now that he is no longer connected with Obama's Administration. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, Lynn and I were at dinner with friends so we missed Obama's final SOTU . I pretty much know what he will say and , as I have written in the past, I no longer have the stomach for listening to his voice.
What I do find fascinating is his address took place against the background, of the provocative capture of our sailors by Iran. Shades of Jimmy. (See 2 and 2a below.)
I did get back in time for Gov. Nikki Haley's response and it was outstanding. Probably one of the best speeches I have heard since Kennedy's inaugural . She was measured, had a touch of humor and her delivery was excellent. Very impressive and she has to be thought of as a bright up and coming star in the Republican's political galaxy
===
The IDF has created a special unit. (See 3 below.)
ISIS v ISIL (See 3a below.)
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Food for thought for those who are willing to think for themselves. (See 4 below.)
====
Dick
If you think about it, Trump is the creation of a failed Obama presidency. Obama created voids, frustration, fear, has been an abject disappointment/failure and the vacuum has been filled by Trump. Why Trump? Well it is simple. Obama is a liar and Trump is a boaster about things that he may not be able to solve but has proven he understands. Much of what he has predicted or discussed has actually come to pass giving him some credibility.
Furthermore he has said what so many are thinking but afraid to say because of PC'sim having gripped/crippled our nation.
So, those who voted for Obama, who could not read the tea leaves because they were blinded by the shine off his teeth and his speechifying can now thank themselves for Trump.
It is just that simple.
My Louisville daughter just sent me the book by the author of this article, Dennis Ross, who seems to be singing a different tune now that he is no longer connected with Obama's Administration. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, Lynn and I were at dinner with friends so we missed Obama's final SOTU . I pretty much know what he will say and , as I have written in the past, I no longer have the stomach for listening to his voice.
What I do find fascinating is his address took place against the background, of the provocative capture of our sailors by Iran. Shades of Jimmy. (See 2 and 2a below.)
I did get back in time for Gov. Nikki Haley's response and it was outstanding. Probably one of the best speeches I have heard since Kennedy's inaugural . She was measured, had a touch of humor and her delivery was excellent. Very impressive and she has to be thought of as a bright up and coming star in the Republican's political galaxy
===
The IDF has created a special unit. (See 3 below.)
ISIS v ISIL (See 3a below.)
====
Food for thought for those who are willing to think for themselves. (See 4 below.)
====
Dick
=============================================================================================
1)
Few issues have confronted President Barack Obama with tougher dilemmas than Syria. Over the course of the nearly five years of the war within Syria, Obama has faced choices on how the United States should respond and he consistently decided to do the minimum. From the outset, when Bashar Assad’s response to calls for reform was draconian and turned peaceful demonstrations into an uprising, the president’s first instinct was avoidance. He looked at Syria and he saw entanglement in another ongoing Middle East conflict where our involvement would be costly, lead to nothing, and potentially make things worse. In nearly every meeting on Syria when presented possible options to affect the Syrian civil war, the president would ask “tell me where this ends.”
1)
How Obama Created a Mideast Vacuum
By Dennis Ross
Few issues have confronted President Barack Obama with tougher dilemmas than Syria. Over the course of the nearly five years of the war within Syria, Obama has faced choices on how the United States should respond and he consistently decided to do the minimum. From the outset, when Bashar Assad’s response to calls for reform was draconian and turned peaceful demonstrations into an uprising, the president’s first instinct was avoidance. He looked at Syria and he saw entanglement in another ongoing Middle East conflict where our involvement would be costly, lead to nothing, and potentially make things worse. In nearly every meeting on Syria when presented possible options to affect the Syrian civil war, the president would ask “tell me where this ends.”
He was surely right to ask this question. But he failed to ask the corollary question: Tell me what happens if we don’t act? Had he known that not acting would produce a vacuum in which a humanitarian catastrophe, a terrible refugee crisis, a deepening proxy war and the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria would occur, his responses might have been different. However, it was hard for him to ask that question because when he looked at Syria, he saw Iraq.
Given the painful legacy of the Iraq War, it was not surprising that he did so. In his eyes, Iraq was a colossal mistake. He had run against it. He had been elected to get us out of Middle East wars not into them. But was Syria really Iraq? As someone who believed (wrongly) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War. Surely, other proponents of the war should be willing to acknowledge now that it was wrong to seek regime change and not understand the vacuum that we would create in doing so; it was wrong to go to war without a serious, well-thought out plan for what it would take to create a credible transition, including the forces on the ground—military and police—needed to ensure security and the means to establish governance; it was wrong for us to become the administrator of Iraq, becoming the symbol of occupation, instead of having a United Nations interim administration; it was wrong to go to war without thinking through the consequences of unleashing a Shia-Sunni conflict that might not be limited to Iraq.
But Syria has always been a different issue. This was not an American invasion of a country but an internal uprising against an authoritarian leader. Assad consciously made it a sectarian conflict, believing he could survive only if the Alawites, and other minorities, saw their survival depending on his. Soon, thereafter, it was transformed into a proxy war largely pitting Saudi Arabia and Turkey against Iran. A vacuum was created not by our replacing the Assad regime but by our hesitancy to do more than offer pronouncements—by overlearning the lessons of Iraq, in effect. And, that vacuum was filled by others: Iran, Hezbollah and Iran’s other Shia militia proxies; Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar; Russia; and ISIL. Unless the U.S. does more now to fill this vacuum, the situation will spin further out of control.
***
In many ways, the vacuum in Syria has been compounded by the sense that the U.S. is retrenching in the region, creating a larger void that has helped to produce the increasing competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Iranians saw they ran little risk with the United States as they ramped up their regional activism and made the Qods force—the action arm of the Revolutionary Guard outside of Iran—more prominent in both the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. Indeed, Qassem Suleiman, the head of the Qods forces, who was previously a shadowy figure, has become a very public presence appearing at times on the ground during the battles over Tikrit in Iraq, al Qusayr in Syria, and other places in both countries. For the Saudis, the nuclear deal and the greater Iranian regional involvement fed their perception that the Obama administration was not prepared to set any real limits on Iran—or act on its red lines. As a result, it has decided to draw its own lines. It has done so in Yemen and will probably find it difficult to extract itself. Its execution of Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, may have been done as much for domestic reasons, particularly given the number of Sunni Al Qaeda operatives that were being executed at the same time, but the Saudis knew the Iranians would react. They had, after all, threatened the Saudis with retribution if they put him to death.
The Saudi-Iranian competition probably won’t escalate into direct conflict but will make them see the existing proxy wars in strictly zero-sum terms. It will surely make it harder for either to be willing to back down in Syria, and is bound to complicate the administration’s hopes to use the Vienna diplomatic process to, in its words, “bring peace and security to Syria.” Even without the deepening Saudi-Iranian divide, the prospects for Vienna were not great and, in any case, depend far more on Vladimir Putin: he has the ability to force the Assad regime to respect a ceasefire, stop the barrel bombs, and permit the creation of humanitarian corridors for the delivery of food and medicine to the areas that the non-ISIL opposition controls. Only in such circumstances will there be any possibility of getting the Saudis, Turks and others who are supporting the opposition to persuade rebel forces to implement a ceasefire—the key to the Vienna process going anywhere and an essential element of the Obama strategy for defeating ISIL. Indeed, so long as there is no meaningful ceasefire between the Assad regime and the non-ISIL opposition in Syria, the Sunni states and tribes will not truly join the fight against ISIL. (If nothing else, they need to be able to show that the onslaught against Sunnis in Syria has stopped and they have succeeded in protecting them.)
While President Obama sees Syria as a quagmire, Putin, for now, does not. He continues to believe that achieving his ends in the war is more important than ensuring that the Vienna process works at this stage. Moreover, whereas the president believes Putin will not want to repeat the mistakes of Afghanistan and will see the need to extricate Russia from Syria at some point, Putin shows little sign of being inhibited by his reading of Russian involvement in Afghanistan—perhaps, knowing that he does not intend a similarly large ground presence and perhaps also believing that we will simply not raise the costs to him. Putin may well be driven by history, but it is his need to make up for the period of Russian weakness and U.S. primacy; he wants to demonstrate that Russian is a superpower and arbiter of events. He sees U.S. retrenchment, and the vacuum it has created, as an opportunity to reassert Russia’s prerogatives in the Middle East.
For President Obama, the Iraq experience continues to loom heavy in his calculus. Like presidents before him, he is being guided by his reading of an analogy. There is nothing wrong with that—provided the analogy is apt.
***
Presidents and their advisers use analogies to shape judgments, particularly when facing hard choices that involve interventions. For Lyndon Johnson, “Munich” was the analogy that disastrously guided him on Vietnam: if we did not stop the communists there—if we “appeased” them there—we would face a much greater and more dangerous threat later on. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, the Munich analogy was powerful and blinded Johnson and those around him to the realities that communism was not monolithic, that the Soviets and Chinese were rivals, and that the war in Vietnam was nationalistic. George H. W. Bush was also guided by this historical reference point when responding to Saddam Hussein in 1990. Indeed, in Oval office meetings, I heard him use the Munich analogy as we mobilized the world against the Iraqi leader after he seized Kuwait; for Bush 41, we could not let this aggression stand lest the law of the jungle replace his hopes for a new world order in the aftermath of the Cold War. President Bush may have used the analogy, but he also clearly defined a limited objective which was to reverse the aggression in Kuwait and not produce regime change in Iraq. The means employed matched the stated objective.
Analogies are going to be used, but they need to reflect real lessons. We have never had a serious discussion in this country about the lessons of the Iraq War. The critics of the war never acknowledged there was anything to discuss; indeed, they saw those who supported the war as fundamentally misguided. For their part, the proponents of the war have been so put on the defensive that they have been reluctant to acknowledge what they got wrong and how things might have been done differently.
We should be tempered by the Iraqi debacle, but we should not overlearn the lessons of the war and misapply them. Not every conflict in the Middle East is a replay of Iraq—and our choices for responding to them should not be reduced to doing nothing or putting massive numbers of troops on the ground.
It may not be easy to find the Goldilocks solution where we don’t do too much as in Iraq or too little as in Syria, but until we have a serious debate about Iraq (and for that matter Syria) and consider what needs to be learned from these conflicts, we will thrash around using false analogies and making bad judgments. Having some guidelines for what we might be prepared to do militarily would help—e.g., being prepared to put some troops on the ground, including deploying spotters for directing air attacks, embedding forces with local partners perhaps to the battalion level, and using special operations elements for hit-and-run raids might allow us to manage our involvement while avoiding the slippery slope that the president has feared.
For sure, even these guidelines should be informed by our first asking hard questions in each case about our stakes and whether we should or need to act, and, if so, in what ways. It is obviously not just better but also necessary for local partners to assume a major responsibility in Middle East conflicts. President Obama is right about that. But we also need to know what will produce them—who might actually fight and where, what will motivate them, what would they need from us, do they believe we will stand by them, and do we or others have leverage on them. In each case, we should assess the range of military options we have. We should be mindful of what the Pentagon calls mission creep. We are more likely to avoid that if like George H. W. Bush, we define our objectives clearly from the start and make sure the means we are prepared to apply match them.
At a time when there is a general consensus on the need to fight ISIL but no consensus on how to do it, the Iraqi legacy and its lessons is the elephant in the room. Confronting it and having an open discussion about it—especially in an election year—may be a necessary part of producing a strategy that can work. It may also be essential for signaling those in the region and outside it that we will no longer be inhibited by its legacy.
Ambassador Dennis Ross is a long-time U.S. Mideast negotiator and author of the recently published Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israeli relationship from Truman to Obama.
=============================================================--
2) BREAKING: Iran Seizes Navy Vessels, Obama Cowers
If you were wondering what the State of the Union was, you don't have to wait until tonight. The answer is "weak," and our enemies know it:
The Pentagon says it briefly lost contact with two small Navy craft in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday but has received assurances from Iran that the crew and vessels will be returned safely and promptly.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook tells The Associated Press that the boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when the US lost contact with them.
Cook says, "We have been in contact with Iran and have received assurances that the crew and the vessels will be returned promptly."
This is clearly the sort of provocative act that a third world, inferior nation like Iran would only take if they perceived the President of the United States to be impotent and inept. Moreover, the timing suggests that this was a deliberate act meant to embarrass President Obama. It's a total disaster. We hope and pray for the safety of the American sailors involved.
- See more at: http://americanactionnews.com/articles/breaking-iran-seizes-navy-vessels-obama-cowers#sthash.vb1rigz3.dpuf
2a)
Initial AP/White House story about U.S. Navy sailors detained by Iran makes little sense
If this story starts making sense, I’ll get this updated.
A Mark VI patrol boat prototype operated by U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf in 2015. (Image: USN via Janes)
The story I heard on Fox News about 4:25 PM EST — breaking at that time — sounded more plausible. Here’s what I wrote in response to a query in the comments section from regular reader jgets:
It sounds like it’s real. Fox is talking as if the sailors were on (probable) RHIBs conducting VBSS in the northern Persian Gulf, and “drifted” into Iranian waters.Fox says they’re being held on Farsi Island. Tiny, totally militarized blip in the NPG. If the story is at least halfway accurate, they probably got near Farsi (around which Iran calculates a territorial waters area) in the execution of their mission. Whether they actually strayed into Iranian waters is another question.
Now I’ve seen the first written news story on it, however, and the assertions being made about the incident are very weird. Here’s what AP says:
The crew of two small Navy craft are being held by Iran, but American officials have received assurances from Tehran that the crew and vessels will be returned safely and promptly.Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told The Associated Press that the boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when the U.S. lost contact with them. …
U.S. officials said that the incident happened near Farsi Island, situated in the middle of the Persian Gulf. They say it stemmed from some type of mechanical trouble with one of the boats, causing them to run aground. The troops were picked up by Iran.
Now, the weirdness of “small Navy craft” out in the Gulf “moving between Kuwait and Bahrain” is probably explained by the boats being some of the new Mark VI patrol boats. In a restricted open-seas area like the Persian Gulf, it’s reasonable to expect boats as small as the Mk VIs to transit such a distance without a “mother” ship.
But if these boats were really doing what the White House says they were doing, they had to go substantially off course to “run aground” on (or near?) Farsi Island. The corridor depicted on the map shows a rough area between the territorial waters of Saudi Arabia and Iran (Farsi Island) where the boats would presumably have been in transit. To be “picked up by Iran,” they’d have to have been on or near Iranian territory. But in that part of the Gulf, there’s only Farsi Island that meets that description. It’s not like they could have run aground on some other rock claimed by Iran and then been taken to Farsi Island. They had to be a good 20 nautical miles off course to be that close to Farsi Island, something that “drifting” while out of communications doesn’t really explain. (The time factor is wrong: the Navy in Manama wouldn’t ignore it that long if comms had been lost. There would have been a helicopter out there pronto.)
In addition to which, it makes zero sense for “some type of mechanical trouble with one of the boats” to cause “them” — both boats? — to run aground.
This story doesn’t hang together, as it stands right now. More later if it comes in. Meanwhile, Fox’s updates indicate the White House is “working on” getting the sailors and boats back.
Map showing roughly where the detained Navy boats are supposed to have been on 12 Jan when Iran nabbed them. (Google map; author annotation)
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3)
IDF creates new, cutting edge unit to combat unconventional weapons
Against the backdrop of a changing battlefield, Israel Hayom has learned that the Israel Defense Forces is in the process of establishing a new company within the Engineering Corps' elite Yahalom (“Diamond”) commando unit to combat the threat of chemical weapons on land.
According to an officer familiar with the details, the decision to create the Sayfan (“Gladiolus”) company was based on the IDF's most up-to-date intelligence assessments. The new unit's mission will be to detect, identify and treat unconventional materials in a combat zone.
The officer said soldiers in the new unit will have a very high security clearance and a unique and advanced set of capabilities, and will use technology that the IDF has never had until now.
“We need fighters who are responsible enough to operate this equipment; fighters who know how to think on their feet and use good judgment,” the officer said.
Recruitment to the elite company began some eight months ago, and in another eight months the first class of recruits will complete their professional training. Soldiers in the specialized training course are required to undergo chemistry and biology studies.
The decision to create Sayfan was made after the IDF decided, over a year ago, to change the mission of the Engineering Corps' unconventional weapons unit, the 76th Battalion, which had been tasked with “identifying and cleansing” areas contaminated by chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield. One IDF official told Israel Hayom that the decision to shift the battalion's designation was made because the “threat of chemical weapons isn't what it used to be.”
With that, defense officials have said recently that despite the fact that most of the chemical weapons prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention have been removed from Syria, it is reasonable to assume that the country still has “residual capabilities,” and it is impossible to know where these materials will end up amid the chaos in Syria.
The officials also said that not all of the chemical materials in Syria are prohibited by the CWC, and that all the factions fighting in Syria — including the regime, the Islamic State group and other rebel groups — have varying degrees of ability to use them. For instance, various factions in the country are using non-lethal neutralizing chemical agents, such as chlorine, which is not prohibited according to the CWC. These chemical materials are considered less effective than the more classic chemical agents, but have proven battle-effective nonetheless. According to assessments in Israel, chemical agents like chlorine are used in Syria on an almost daily basis. On a slightly more comforting note, it is believed that Hezbollah does not possess this type of weapon in Lebanon.
The decision to create Sayfan is just one in a series of significant changes to Yahalom. In the past year, as part of the lessons learned from Operation Protective Edge, the decision was made to substantially increase the elite unit's scope and size. Additionally, command of the unit will now be assigned to a full colonel, rather than a lieutenant colonel. As such, Col. Yaron Beit-On was recently appointed to the lead the unit.
3a)
ISIS = Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Iraq is to the east of Jordan (shaped like the hatchet) and Syria is to the north.
ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Now, to us Westerners we don't really make much of a distinction, do we?No, honestly from our perspective it’s all about the same. But how would a Muslim living in the Middle East view it? Just what is the Levant anyway? Let’s take a look. The geographical term LEVANT refers to a multi-nation region in the Middle East. It’s a land bridge between Turkey to the north and Egypt to the south.If you look on a map, however, in the near exact middle of the nations that comprise the Levant, guess what you see? Come on, guess!It’s Israel.****When Barack Obama refers over and over to the Islamic State as ISIL, he is sending a message to Muslims all over the Middle East, that he personally does not recognize Israel as a sovereign nation, but as territory belonging to the Islamic State.Now you know why Obama says that he has no plan, no goal, and no stated aim for dealing with ISIS.But he does have a plan, and it’s a really nasty, diabolical one.Obama’s plan is to drag his feet for as long as he can, doing only the bare minimum that Congress forces him to do. His plan to buy ISIL as much time as possible to make as many gains as they can. Listen as Obama and his press secretary and the spokesperson for the State Department and his Joint Chiefs of Staff painstakingly spells out the letters I-S-I-L so there is no doubt in your mind. And it’s working. The Islamic State has garnered millions of dollars, a vast cache of weapons, and in their latest foray have captured Syrian fighter jets and now 12 commercial passenger planes. With each passing day that Obama fulfills his stated aim of doing nothing, the Islamic State grows by leaps and bounds. The ultimate goal, of course, has not changed and will never change.The ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel.Now you know a little bit more about why Obama chooses his words so carefully."A Jew who votes for Obama is like a chicken who votes for Col. Sanders."
=================================================================================4)The following is an essay by Mike van Biezen, a Physics Professor at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, in which the issue of man-man global warming is politely discussed. Professor van Biezen is a "denier," as was Alan
The next time you hear someone touting the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, you will be prepared to make an intelligent response to this United Nations international con-job and political scam, which they have been pushing since 1988, that is nothing more than an international political scheme to redistribute the wealth of the industrialized world to the beggar nations of the Third World, through "international emissions trading."
Given our dear leader's recent support for this United Nations fraud, watch for him to continue to be active in perpetuating this falsehood, after he leaves office, in 2017. After all, clean energy initiatives were a very big part of his presidency; it was the way that he paid off his political donors and bundlers, by pouring $40 billion dollars into inefficient green energy programs that went bankrupt, as part of his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Global warming, some facts to consider
It made sense. Knowing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that our industrialized world is adding a large amount of it to the atmosphere on a yearly basis, I accepted the premise that this would cause global temperatures to rise. But one day about 7 years ago, I looked at the ubiquitous graph showing the “global” temperature of the last 150 years and noticed something odd. It was subtle, and as I found out later, disguised so that it would be overlooked. There appeared to be a period of about 40 years between 1940 and 1980 where the global temperatures actually declined a bit. As a data analysis expert, I could not ignore that subtle hint and began to look into it a little more. Forty years is a long time, and while carbon dioxide concentrations were increasing exponentially over the same period, I could not overlook that this showed an unexpected shift in the correlation between global temperatures and CO2 concentrations. Thus I began to look into it a little further and here are some of the results 7 years later.
Before we begin, let’s establish what we know to be correct. The global average temperature has increased since the 1980’s. Since the 1980’s glaciers around the world are receding and the ice cap of the Arctic Ocean has lost ice since the 1980’s, especially during the summer months. The average global temperature for the last 10 years is approximately 0.35 degrees centigrade higher than it was during the 1980’s. The global warming community has exploited these facts to “prove” that human activity (aka burning of fossil fuels) is the cause of these increasing temperatures. But no direct scientific proof or data has been shown that link the current observations to human activity. The link is assumed to be simply a fact, with no need to investigate or discuss any scientific data.
Here are 10 of the many scientific problems with the assumption human activity is causing “global warming” or “climate change”:
1. Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual.
The all-time high temperature record for the world was set in 1913, while the all-time cold temperature record was set in 1983. By continent, all but one set their all-time high temperature record more recently than their all-time cold temperature records. In the United States, which has more weather stations than any other location in the world, more cold temperature records by state were set more recently than hot temperature records. When the temperature records for each state were considered for each month of the year, a total of 600 data points (50 states x 12 months), again cold temperature records were set in far greater numbers more recently and hot temperature records were set longer ago. This is directly contradictory to what would be expected if global warming were real.
2. Satellite temperature data does not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly:
Starting at the end of 1978, satellites began to collect temperature data from around the globe. For the next 20 years, until 1998, the global average temperature remained unchanged in direct contradiction to the earth-bound weather station data, which indicated “unprecedented” temperature increases. In 1998 there was a strong El Nino year with high temperatures, which returned to pre-1998 levels until 2001. In 2001 there was a sudden jump in the global temperature of about 0.3 degrees centigrade which then remained at about that level for the next 14 years, with a very slight overall decrease in the global temperatures during that time.
3. Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years:
If the current temperatures are compared to those of the 1930’s one would find nothing remarkable. For many places around the world, the 1930’s were the warmest decade of the last 100 years, including those found in Greenland. Comparing today’s temperatures to the 1980’s is like comparing our summer temperatures to those in April, rather than those of last summer. It is obvious why the global warming community does this, and very misleading (or deceiving).
4. The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980:
Many places around the world experienced a quite significant and persistent cooling trend to the point where scientists began to wonder if the world was beginning to slide into a new ice age period. For example, Greenland experienced some of the coldest years in 120 years during the 1980’s, as was the case in many other places around the world. During that same 40-year period, the CO2 levels around the world increased by 17%, which is a very significant increase. If global temperatures decreased by such a significant amount over 40 years while atmospheric CO2 increased by such a large amount we can only reach two conclusions: 1. There must be a weak correlation, at best, between atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures, 2. There must be stronger factors driving climate and temperature than atmospheric CO2.
5. Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations:
It has been shown that nighttime temperatures recorded by many weather stations have been artificially raised by the expulsion of radiant heat collected and stored during the daytime by concrete and brick structures such as houses, buildings, roads, and also cars. Since land area of cities and large towns containing these weather stations only make up a very small fraction of the total land area, this influence on global average temperature data is significant. Since the daytime and nighttime temperatures are combined to form an average, these artificially-raised nighttime temperatures skew the average data. When one only looks at daytime temperatures only from larger urban areas, the “drastic global warming” is no longer visible. (This can also be seen when looking at nearby rural area weather station data, which is more indicative of the true climate of that area).
6. There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels:
Contrary to what would be assumed when listening to global warming banter or while watching An Inconvenient Truth, higher temperatures increase atmospheric CO2 levels and lower temperatures decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, not the other way around. Any college freshman chemistry student knows that the solubility of CO2 decreases with increasing temperatures and thus Earth’s oceans will release large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere when the water is warmer and will absorb more CO2 when the water is colder. That is why the CO2 level during the ice ages was so much lower than the levels today. That doesn’t take away the fact that we are artificially raising the atmospheric CO2 levels, but just because we do, that doesn’t mean that this will cause temperatures to increase in any significant way. The 40-year cooling period between 1940 and 1980 appear to support that premise. What we can conclude is that the ice ages were not caused by changes in the atmospheric CO2 levels and that other stronger factors were involved with these very large climate changes.
7. The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes:
The CO2 molecule is a linear molecule and thus only has limited natural vibrational frequencies, which in turn give this molecule only limited capability of absorbing radiation that is radiated from the Earth’s surface. The three main wavelengths that can be absorbed by CO2 are 4.26 micrometers, 7.2 micrometers, and 15.0 micrometers. Of those 3, only the 15-micrometer is significant because it falls right in range of the infrared frequencies emitted by Earth. However, the H2O molecule which is much more prevalent in the Earth’s atmosphere, and which is a bend molecule, thus having many more vibrational modes, absorbs many more frequencies emitted by the Earth, including to some extent the radiation absorbed by CO2. It turns out that between water vapor and CO2, nearly all of the radiation that can be absorbed by CO2 is already being absorbed. Thus increasing the CO2 levels should have very minimal impact on the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat radiated from the Earth. That explains why there appears to be a very weak correlation at best between CO2 levels and global temperatures and why after the CO2 levels have increased by 40% since the beginning of the industrial revolution the global average temperature has increased only 0.8 degrees centigrade, even if we want to contribute all of that increase to atmospheric CO2 increases and none of it to natural causes.
8. There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution:
Even in the 1990 IPCC report a chart appeared that showed the medieval warm period as having had warmer temperatures than those currently being experienced. But it is hard to convince people about global warming with that information, so five years later a new graph was presented, now known as the famous hockey stick graph, which did away with the medieval warm period. Yet the evidence is overwhelming at so many levels that warmer periods existed on Earth during the medieval warm period as well as during Roman Times and other time periods during the last 10,000 years. There is plenty of evidence found in the Dutch archives that shows that over the centuries, parts of the Netherlands disappeared beneath the water during these warm periods, only to appear again when the climate turned colder. The famous Belgian city of Brugge, once known as “Venice of the North,” was a sea port during the warm period that set Europe free from the dark ages (when temperatures were much colder), but when temperatures began to drop with the onset of the little ice age, the ocean receded and now Brugge is ten miles away from the coastline. Consequently, during the medieval warm period the Vikings settled in Iceland and Greenland and even along the coast of Canada, where they enjoyed the warmer temperatures, until the climate turned cold again, after which they perished from Greenland and Iceland became ice-locked again during the bitter cold winters. The camps promoting global warming have been systematically erasing mention of these events in order to bolster the notion that today’s climate is unusual compared to our recent history.
9. Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
The notion of melting glaciers as prove positive that global warming is real has no real scientific basis. Glaciers have been melting for over 150 years. It is no secret that glaciers advanced to unprecedented levels in recent human history during the period known as the Little Ice Age. Many villages in the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps saw their homes threatened and fields destroyed by these large ice masses. Pleas went out to local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance. Around 1850, the climate returned to more “normal” temperatures and the glaciers began to recede. But then between 1940 and 1980, as the temperatures declined again, most of the glaciers halted their retreat and began to expand again, until warmer weather at the end of the last century caused them to continue the retreat they started 150 years earlier. Furthermore, we now know that many of the glaciers around the world did not exist 4000 to 6000 years ago. As a case in point, there is a glacier to the far north of Greenland above the large ice sheet covering most of the island called the Hans Tausen Glacier. It is 50 miles long ,30 miles wide and up to 1000 feet thick. A Scandinavian research team bored ice cores all the way to the bottom and discovered that 4000 years ago this glacier did not exist. It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist but have returned because of the onset of colder weather. Today’s temperatures are much lower than those that were predominant during the Holocene era as substantiated by studying the many cores that were dug from Greenland’s ice sheet.
10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming:
For the first several years of my research I relied on the climate data banks of NASA and GISS, two of the most prestigious scientific bodies of our country. After years of painstaking gathering of data, and relentless graphing of that data, I discovered that I was not looking at the originally gathered data, but data that had been “adjusted” for what was deemed “scientific reasons.” Unadjusted data is simply not available from these data banks. Fortunately I was able to find the original weather station data from over 7000 weather stations from around the world in the KNMI database. (Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute). There I was able to review both the adjusted and unadjusted data as well as the breakout of the daytime and nighttime data. The results were astounding. I found that data from many stations around the world had been systematically “adjusted” to make it seem that global warming was happening when, in fact, for many places around the world the opposite was true. Following will be a few of the myriad of examples of this data adjustment. When I present my material during presentations at local colleges, these are the charts that have some of the greatest impact in affecting the opinion of the students, especially when they realize that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent what is actually happening. Another amazing result was that when only graphing the daily highs from around the country, a very different picture arises from the historical temperature data.
There are many more specific areas that I have researched and for which I have compiled data and presentation material, equally compelling regarding at exposing the fallacies of global warming. A new twist has swept the global warming movement lately, especially since they had to admit that their own data showed that there was a “hiatus” on the warming, as illustrated in the 2014 IPCC report; their data showed an actual cooling over the last 10 years. The new term: “climate change” is now taking over,such that unusual events of any kind, like the record snowfall in Boston, can be blamed on the burning of fossil fuels without offering any concrete scientific data as to how one could cause the other.
Mike van Biezen is adjunct professor at Compton College, Santa Monica College, El Camino College, and Loyola Marymount University teaching Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Earth Science.
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