Essays in Idleness

A lovely term appears in today’s dispatches, new at least to me: “thermal machismo.” It is used to describe people who, like the Lord Denizen of the High Doganate, or the Pope, refuse to buy air conditioners, and instead, tough it through the heat of summer. Or at least, tell other people to do so. But I am prepared to share this new honour with all my fellow global-warming deniers, whether or not they own air conditioners. Let us all exhibit thermal machismo. Let me show the way.

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Gentle reader may be aware — for it is repeated daily in the mass media — that “97 percent” of the world’s soi-disant “climate experts” support the “anthropogenic global warming” hypothesis. This is a “scientific consensus.” It corresponds, roughly, with the proportion of money paid out for research to confirm it. Less than 3 percent is available for its refutation; even the big oil companies find that PR requires them to follow the AGW mob.

Such numbers hardly impress me. Joe Stalin regularly polled higher in Soviet general elections. I believe his friend Trofim Lysenko also enjoyed a “scientific consensus” for his groundbreaking genetic ideas — even before the “deniers” were formally outlawed in 1948.

Am I comparing unlikes? No, I think it is perfectly valid to compare one massive scientific fraud with another. Alternatively, and more tediously, one might review the whole history of “scientific consensus,” and facetiously suggest that we reverse the odds on the hypothesis finally proving true, and give it that three in a hundred. But really, its chances are zero, as is the case with all tail-wags-dog theories.

The difference between “science” and “consensus” ought to have been taught in grade school. It is a source of regret to me that public education standards have fallen so low.

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But here, for comparison, is an example of science where “97 percent” might count. It is a predictive model for solar activity which, unlike the atmospheric models for planet Earth, requires only modest computer time. The actual data from the last few solar cycles was used, leaving no room for virtual cartloads of vague estimates, convenient adjustments, and untested assumptions.

The Sun has, for many centuries now, been observed to have a (rather irregular) magnetic heartbeat — a cycle of about eleven years (it has ranged from less than eight to a little more than fourteen), during which it passes from a minimum to a maximum of magnetic activity, and then back again. A rash of sunspots, solar flares, and the like, are decorative features of the maximums, along with beautiful auroras here on Earth, and magnetic storms so glorious that they could potentially take out our electrical grids. As insolation rises and falls, so does the temperature of the upper atmosphere, which thus swells and shrinks dramatically — affecting the orbits of all our space junk up there, like the waves of the sea.

We will return to that in a moment; but first let me insert a meandering aside.

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Given world enough and time, I should like some day to muse upon the astrophysical approach to meteorology. It is my suspicion that it will eventually supply extremely accurate long-term weather forecasts — by uncovering the curtain-rail mechanisms that successively steer the atmospheric pressure systems from the top, down.

Indeed, I know a brilliant madman who thinks the main tracks can already be read in an astronomical almanac, from the relative positions of Earth, Jupiter, and Sun, and thus the interaction of their majestic magnetic fields; that he can already anticipate the twists and turns of the frontal systems from them, then flesh out the weather on the ground from this; and that he can do it for any date in the future or past, with a free afternoon and a pocket calculator. (It is hard to judge whether he has been shunned by his meteorological colleagues for being weird, for being right, or for both.)

Meanwhile we might ramble on the ozone layer, and the curious way it thickens and thins, to let more ultraviolet radiation through at solar minimums, less at solar maximums — and from a wonderfully simple, testable cause. The UV rays themselves split the oxygen molecules to regenerate the ozone; thus the more UV, the thicker our sunscreen. The world works, and life is possible, thanks to innumerable happy little facts like that.

I mention this only by way of reminding gentle reader that good science requires an uncompromising faith in God — Who not only placed living creatures on this Earth, by an extraordinary sequence of irreproducible creative acts, extended over billions of our years; but foresaw what would be needed to protect them.

The ozone scare that the atheists tried on a generation ago — in the hope of crippling human enterprise with a pointless ban on nontoxic, nonflammable, extremely useful chlorofluorocarbons; at ultimate cost chiefly to the world’s poor — should be studied carefully to understand not only the present “climate change” fraud, but every other imposture that has preceded and will succeed it. The formula does not vary.

Public ignorance is currently being exploited with the witch-focus on innocent carbon dioxide, the ozone hole having had its day. But there are thousands, perhaps millions of other plausible substances around which the next planetary scare can be designed. The cynical seize upon each in turn to extend their worldly power. As all demonic agents, they rule by fear. And as all demonic agents, they are easily defeated, by withdrawing our fear, and suddenly substituting our laughter.

For in the end, they are not scary at all, but sad, grim, and pitiable; and in the end, Christ will defend His own.

*

For the moment, however, it is sufficient merely to grasp that the Sun is both direct and indirect source of our heat; that more radiation generally corresponds to more heat; and vice versa.

We are currently in Solar Cycle No. 24, of systematic record-keeping going back to the reconstructed Solar Cycle No. 1 of 1755–66. By now we begin to discern cycles within cycles (for instance, there seems to be a background ninety-year cycle, too), which correspond suggestively to our longer-term climate patterns. The sunspot cycles are understood to reveal a dynamo in the convective fluids deep within that fiery orb. This explains the overall movement or throb, but recent models can account for few of the irregularities.

By positing a second dynamic cycle, closer to the Sun’s surface, that interacts a little asymmetrically with the first, Valentina Zharkova (of Northumbria University, UK) may have unlocked the crown jewels:

“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately eleven years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time. Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97 percent.”

Now, that 97 percent is an actual correlation; not a vote by climate “experts” for their next round at the public trough. Something that works on 97 percent of the past is more likely to work on 97 percent of the future, than something that has been pulled out of a (very sophisticated, empty) hat.

And if it does, we now know what is coming: another extended “Maunder minimum” of the kind that was enjoyed by Londoners, from 1645 to 1700, when the Thames formed the habit of freezing over, the rich could travel about in sleds, and the poor learn to skate or slide.

Solar Cycle No. 25 will peak in the year 2022, already weaker than the one before, if Prof Zharkova is right. (And, No. 24 was weaker than No. 23.) The dynamos, by her calculation, are so aligned to cancel that the solar minimum from the beginning of Cycle No. 26, about 2030, will mark the beginning of another mini-ice age. There will be very few sunspots for a very long time — at least three more solar cycles. And lots more pretty ice and snow.

We will be able to test whether she is right, conclusively, over the next few years. Compare: the carbon dioxide hypothesis which can only be tested by a judgement call — this ongoing vote by the “experts” in whose livelihoods we have all become tragically over-invested.