http://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/85633-jamesveverka-4-24-662-sea-ice
To the Editor,
Don Ewing was wrong about the war on women and the tea party's parasitic relationship with corporate funding; now he is wrong about the Little Ice Age (LIA). Russ Wiles used a site that has an demonology expert for his anti-vaxxer claims and now he is mostly wrong about polar ice. Mr Ewing wants to equate the warming that began around 1850 with our present warming but that claim ignores important data. The best evidence for the cause of the warming trend of the mid-1800s is that solar activity increased. A decrease in volcanic activity is also in the cards. Contrary to what climate change deniers claim, volcanic activity causes global cooling due to the release of Sulfate aerosols. The problem with Mr Ewing's explanation is that around 55 years ago, solar activity began a trend downward while warming continued to pick up. This cooling reversed itself after a decade for about a decade but for the last 35 years the sun has been on a cooling trend.[1] What this clearly suggests is that while post-LIA warming may be connected to increased solar activity, its rather imaginative to claim the climate forcing of the 19th century is responsible for our present trend. Solar activity, which brought us warming, has decreased overall since 1960 yet the warming continues. Solar activity and global warming are going in opposite directions.
Mr Wiles chimed in recently, "The Antarctic has record levels of ice while the Arctic has regained much of the ice lost over the past decade". Not so quick, Russ. The Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum ice extent on Feb 25, 2015. The Winter peak extent of Arctic ice this year is the lowest on record and one of the earliest since satellites went up in 1979.[2] The Arctic has not regained any lost ice over the decade. On the contrary, satellite data shows that Summer Minimums and Winter Maximums have declined and the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles of ice a year.[3] In the matter of the Antarctic there are two kinds of ice to be measured because it is a continent while the Arctic is mostly sea ice and some of Greenland. Continental ice is not the same animal as sea ice. Also consider that while ice advances and recedes in two dimensions, how thick is it and what is its volume? Measuring ice is a three dimensional job. Using satellite laser and radar altimetry, the elevation and thickness of land ice across the Antarctic ice sheet can be measured. The data so far says the West Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula sheets are losing ice steadily while the East Antarctic sheet has gained slightly. Added up, the Continent lost 1,350 billion tons of ice into the oceans between 1992 and 2011.
On the other hand, Antarctica sea ice has gained some. According to to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Antarctic sea ice covered a record 7.72 million square miles on September 19, 2014.[4] The average maximum extent in Antarctica between 1981 and 2010 was 7.23 million square miles. The Arctic has lost a yearly average of 20,800 square miles of sea ice while the Antarctic gained 7300 square miles. The Antarctic sea ice gains make up only a third of the ice lost each year in the Arctic. Thats a net loss of 13,500 square miles of sea ice a year while the continent is losing around 70 billion tons of land ice each year. Greenland is no longer stable and is losing 286 billion tons of ice per year.[5]
Just about everything else Mr Wiles and Mr Ewing claim can also be refuted quite easily but space prohibits today. I will certainly take them up if they wish. Next up? Another edition of Tea Party Potty Tricks!
After Mr Ewing's response: My rebuttal 4-29-2015
http://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/85770-james-veverka-4-29-370-the-sun
http://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/85770-james-veverka-4-29-370-the-sun
To The Daily Sun,
Don Ewing is in full bladder mode again. In his latest rambling letter as chief corporate shill, he did not provide a single rebuttal for my science-based claim that the post-Little Ice Age warming trend was not the same warming trend we're are presently in — as he claimed in a previous letter. Mr Ewing gets his science from right-wing sites like CATO and AEI, which I have also read. Right-wing economic sites lick the corporate boot and shine their shoes if they ask. Corporations help run them and fund them, too. Mr Ewing speaks for fossil fuel giants. Fossils love fossils!
Not once did he use "sun" or "solar" to refute my scientific data about the sun. It's because he can't. So he changed the subject to more corporate propaganda instead of addressing the central point of my argument: Solar irradiation. Mr Ewing, running with his tale between his legs, could not answer this simple question: If increased solar irradiation ended the Little Ice Age 160 years ago, why hasn't it started cooling? In fact, in the last 35 years, the sun has not bumped upward once but has steadily cooled unabated. Why isn't it getting colder? If the increase in the sun 's energy made us warmer in the mid-1900s why doesn't the decrease in the solar irradiation make it cooler. Why is it getting warmer if the sun is cooling? Come on, big boy!
The next time Mr Ewing wants to refute a claim, he should actually try to refute it instead of side-stepping it in favor of more right wing nonsense which is also so easily refuted. His letter reminded me of a spasm. His claims about CO2 are misinformed but I am waiting for Mr Ewing to provide a rebuttal for my solar activity claims which support human interference hypotheses before I put the silver spike in his CO2 fairy tales. He can just concede and we can move on. If he can't refute my solar energy claims then provide an explanation that isn't just right wing propaganda. Let's see some science, big guy. Concede on the sun and then we can move on to your other claims, one by one.
AND again!
http://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/86182-james-veverka-5-19-610
Climate Models Predict Trends 5-19-2015
To The Daily Sun,
I guess Don Ewing is not up to the challenge. He would rather make excuses, like discarding my rebuttal of his claim the warming trend of 160 years ago is also responsible for the present warming as minutiae. An increase in the sun's output is responsible for our leaving the LIA behind but the sun's output dropped significantly, beginning in the 1950s.
If the sun caused the 19th Century warming, why is warming accelerating if the sun began to cool more than 60 years ago? Don? Because he can't answer, he goes back to the standard CATO-Koch Brothers parroting and cherry picking. Nice try, Don, but you didn't answer the question, and again in this last letter just went rambling off into the usual right-wing cloud of unsourced talking points. I debunked two other bits of minutiae in the same letter. Russ Wiles made false claims about the polar regions which were easily refuted with scientific data and the technology we use. Footnotes were provided from NASA and more. Minutiae!
It takes far fewer words to make a claim than to provide a rebuttal. So it's easy for Don to ramble off a lot of Exxon-supported, unsubstantiated claims in a short time. Rebuttals demand constructing faceted explanations so that is why I chose just three of the popular myths of the denial crowd. As you can see by his latest letter, Mr. Ewing strings together the same old right-wing propaganda. Complicated answers are required for simplistic claims, so he may consider it just troublesome minutiae to be found in error. "Saying it's so" is how Mr. Ewing rants, while never citing sources or references. Of course, his sources are corporate-funded, too. Everything he writes can be refuted, but it has to be done claim by claim. Science brings many lines of evidence together to make a case so counter claims have to be addressed in similar fashion.
So while we are at it, let me get to some more minutiae. Besides the fact that Mr. Ewing has no answers as to why the sun's output and temperatures are going in opposite directions now, Mr. Ewing states, "based on the failed predictions of the consensus of his "scientists" over the last 20-30 years, is unpredictable." Unfortunately for the purveyors of pseudoscience, the predictions have not failed. The IPCC predictions on sea level are right in line with satellite data and tide gauges over the last 25 years. [1] Tide gauges show that the sea level has been rising since 1970, when installed.
Furthermore, forecasts of global temperature rises have proved to be remarkably accurate according to a paper published by the journal Nature Geoscience. Myles Allen and colleagues at Oxford University accurately predicted the warming in the past decade 1999-2010, relative to the decade 1986-1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree. [2] Predicting greenhouse gases will warm the planet isn't new. In 1861, chemist and physicist John Tyndale predicted eventual warming due to CO2. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist who claimed in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming.[3] He was also a physicist.
Climate models predict trends, not events. Climate is not the same as weather. If Russ Wiles had known the difference between weather and climate, he would not have cited the views of meteorologists as relevant on climate change consensus. Consensus among climate scientists is very strong. I will explain in my next letter. I hope I didn't waste any of Don's time with the minutiae of debunking his claim about predictions. Of course there are many more examples of accurate predictions but, hey, this isn't a thesis.
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