Following on the British scandal about manipulated global warming data, now the evidence is coming out that US “experts” are similarly manipulating data. The Weather Channel’s founder, John Coleman, charges NASA with deliberate manipulation of climate data to emphasize global warming.

This is not really news to those who take the time to understand climate facts. And here are a few, with my own extrapolations and conclusions:

1) The world has been in a global warming phase for 50,000 years – ever since the middle of the last ice age, when temperatures started warming. According to long-term patterns, we should expect the earth to keep warming for at least another 10,000 years, which is the soonest the cycle is likely to turn back toward the next ice age.

This has nothing to do with human behavior, and human behavior has NO impact on the long-term trends. We MIGHT be able to change our local climates temporarily, but we are NOT the cause of long-term warming or the inevitable melting of ice caps – that’s happened many times through the Earth’s billions of years of history, and ice caps will come back again.

These patterns are caused by the Milankovitch cycles – three cosmic cycles that have to do with the TILT of the Earth on its axis( called obliquity), the WOBBLE (called precession) of the earth as it rotates on its axis, and the fact that the earth’s ORBIT around the sun varies from a near circle to an ellipse (called orbital eccentricity). Tilt varies over a 41,000 year cycle; wobble varies over a 23,000 cycle, and the orbit varies over a 100,000 year cycle. Currently, the wobble is favorable to glaciation, but tilt and orbit are not: hence, less glaciation, more melting.

2) The general warming trend is interrupted by cooling cycles. Those cycles can last for just a few decades, or for hundreds, even thousands of years. These cycle changes are not triggered by human carbon-release patterns, but by sunspot activity. This was well-known and part of the science taught in public schools in the early 1970s, when I was in high school. On the basis of sunspot cycles, we were warned that global cooling was just around the corner.

Today, while public media and politicians say warming is unending because of human behavior, the FULL data consistently doesn’t support that conclusion, and the recent reduction in sunspot activity indicates that for at least the next 50 years or so, the general climate trend will be cooler. The Russian equivalent to NASA says that recent warm trends were related to high sunspot activity over the last 100 years. But that’s now changing, and we will be in a deep freeze by about 2060, which will last until about 2110, when temperatures will begin rising again due to renewed sunspot activity.

3) As the Earth warms, more carbon dioxide is released BY THE EARTH into the atmosphere. That’s because carbon dioxide is less-easily trapped by algae, plants, and other trappers in warmer temperatures. That accounts for the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we are experiencing.

Even if humans burned every carbon-bearing plant on the Earth at once, our impact on this release-and-capture cycle would be minor and short-lived. Similarly, if we stopped all human carbon dioxide production – including through killing off all breathing animals, including ourselves – our impact on the cycle would be both minimal and short-lived. The problem humans have is to realize and accept the fact that we are really not all that significant in the natural course of things. We are only big and important in our own minds.

But apart from all of that, carbon dioxide release is not a bad thing. In fact, the release of captured carbon dioxide causes less of the sun’s rays to get to the Earth, causing a gradual increase in Earth-level cooling. At the same time, because carbon dioxide is a light element, it carries warmth to the upper atmosphere and released heat into space. In other words, carbon dioxide capture-and-release functions as a natural warming and cooling mechanism that helps to maintain the Earth in a life-sustaining range. When it’s captured at Earth level, it is a kind of chemical blanket, warming the Earth; when it is in the upper atmosphere, it is a kind of sun shade, cooling the Earth. Carbon dioxide functions like an increasingly-warm blanket when the Earth is getting colder, and as an increasingly-thicker sun shade when the Earth is getting warmer. That’s pretty amazing – and ought to be a cause of wonder, if not reverence; but not angst.

4) Finally, global warming and cooling is not a steady, gradual process. There are thresholds in both directions, when over a period of just a few thousand years, major changes take place. As the ice age came to an end roughly 20,000 years ago, the Earth went through nearly 10,000 years of very dramatic climate change. The weather was wild and life had to adapt to geologically-rapid changes in living conditions. Humans were able to successfully adapt, but many animals, insects and plants failed to adapt, and died out. They were replaced, however, by the flora and fauna we know today.

It is not unreasonable to expect that we will continue to have periods of wild weather that interrupt steady climate warming. Some of those wild periods will be caused by reverses in the general pattern – such as the current switch from warming to cooling that is now taking place because of the reduction in sun spot activity. Others will happen as we approach an average-temperature threshold that triggers changes in what flora and fauna can survive. Perhaps in time we will learn where those thresholds are, so we can predict wild weather and species depopulation; but we will not be able to stop it.

Both in times of gradual warming, and in times of climate drama, we will see the loss of animals and plants we have always had as companions. The thing to remember is that that’s NOT because of human activity; it’s part of the natural cycle and has happened many times in the Earth’s 4 billion-year life. And, we need to remember that those losses will be replaced by new forms of life. Most importantly, we need to understand that we CANNOT stop the process anymore than we can make the Earth stop in its tilt, wobble and orbital variation, or make the sun stop varying its sunspot activity – because that’s what it would take to stop the changing of the Earth’s climate.

What’s really pathetic is that all of this is known to the scientific community. Politics (in the form of job security and in the form of what governmental and non-governmental funding sources want to see in research proposals) causes scientists to be dishonest, as we have seen in Britain and, now, in the U.S. How weird is it that the Russians are being the most open, honest, and transparent about climate science??

Here is an editorial on the issue from Investor’s Business Daily.

A U.S. ClimateGate?
Posted 01/22/2010 07:33 PM ET

Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel’s founder accuse NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain’s Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop?

We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA’s two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of “creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based.”

Joseph D’Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA “systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations.” The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.

E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D’Aleo, said he found “patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.” The more he looked, the more he found “patterns of deletion that could not be accidental.”

Stations in places such as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning, according to D’Aleo, temperatures from these areas are now “determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.” He says it’s as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis and Kansas City.

Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA’s data and conclusions suspect. D’Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a “scientific travesty” committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.

To us, it looks like just another example of ideologically driven climate deceit following the Climate Research Unit scandal and the fraudulent claim by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would soon vanish.

(Original IBD editorial, here. My prior article on milankovitch cycles and global warming, with source links, here.)