Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment.

In Al Gore’s new “documentary” bomb, “An inconvenient sequel” he has wisely backed away from his previous “Documentary” “An inconvenient truth”, where he predicted (in January 2006) that the “point of no return” would happen within 10 years with accelerating sea level rises, more hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes and extreme heat rendering the earth uninhabitable. However, Mr. Gore still defends his claim that the street flooding that occurred during Hurricane Sandy was a fulfillment of his prediction that Manhattan would be underwater due to global warming!

This is Al Gore’s rhetoric. What really speaks is his actions.  He flies all over the world in a private jet spreading his gospel of minimizing CO2 emissions. One time in Gothenburg, Sweden on a cold winter evening he let his limousine idle for the whole time he was making his appearance at the local environmentalist hysteria convention. Sweden has a 2 min limit on idling to save fuel and minimize pollution, so for his carelessness for the environment he got rightfully fined. Then there is the issue with the energy consumption in his houses. His 3 main homes consume as much energy as 34 normal households use.

One of his homes is near the beach in Montecito Ca, an area that would be severely impacted by his predicted sea level rise.

And for that matter , former President Obama is jetting around the world with secret service protection, visiting tropical paradises, that believe it or not have the largest carbon footprints in the world since everything western has to be imported. It is also rumored that he, through agents has secured the former “Hawaii 5-0” beachfront mansion, and we “know” that the Hawaiian islands are sinking fast.

This is all rhetoric. What are the observed facts so far?

Global average sea levels have not risen at all the last 2 years.

And if we look at the data from 1993 (the year satellite measurements began) the amount of sea level rise is not increasing.

The average sea level rise over the whole world is 3.4 mm/year or about a foot per century, and is not increasing more rapidly recently. We are still recovering from the last ice age. The planet is becoming less ovoid, more like a sphere. In the Bothnian Bay land is rising out of the ocean at a rate of about 3 feet per century and in Hudson Bay the rise is as much as 4 feet per century. It is by no means over yet.

The displaced water gets redistributed over the rest of the earth. In addition the Mid-Atlantic ridge is expanding and rising with numerous undersea volcanoes, maybe up to one third of all undersea volcanoes are located between Jan Mayen and Svalbard. Tectonic plate movements explain the rest.

The Eastern Seaboard is slowly sinking into the sea, more than the rest of the world. The expansion of the ocean is not accelerating.The take home from this picture is that there are cyclical factors quite apart from rising CO2, but sea level rise is not accelerating.

So, what about Al Gore’s claim that superstorm Sandy was caused by global warming?

As usual, Al Gore is totally wrong on this, too.

 Contrary to popular reporting of the unprecedented storm surge during superstorm Sandy there has been two recorded hurricanes with higher storm surges. They both occurred in the 1600’s, during the little ice age and can be explained by a late hurricane coming up the East coast being drawn inland by an early outbreak of cold arctic air.

Winter arrived early in the Arctic that year and pulled in hurricane Sandy making it a superstorm with not much wind but a very strong storm surge lasting a long time over a large area.

What’s the worst-case scenario?

CO2 concentration is rising at an unprecedented rate, more than half a percent per year, an order of magnitude faster than the CO2 rise coming out of the ice age. The Arctic ice cap just showed a record low maximum, and the Antarctic ice cap was recently at a new low  since measurements began. So why am I not worried?

Well, I am, but not for the reason you think. What we are seeing is the rain-out after the last el-nino. But not only that, we are in a general cooling trend which the rain-out is masking. Let me explain.

This winter the Arctic was about 12 degrees F warmer than normal on average with a spike of 30 degrees F warmer than normal, well documented.                  What happened?  There came one storm after another all the way from the Philippines or China and caused record rain and snowfall in California.

So much for California’s “unending drought”.

Then the storms went over the West, picked up more moisture from the Mexican Gulf and went up the East Coast, rained in the North Atlantic and snowed out in the Arctic and Greenland. The picture on the right shows just much it has snowed this winter over Greenland, a record snow accumulation so far. And it is concentrated to  East Greenland while North and West Greenland had normal snowfalls. The storms went up through Iceland and it rained as far north as Svalbard, preventing the Barents Sea from freezing, but delivering so much snow to the rest of the Arctic that the ice accumulation was near normal in spite of the unusually warm winter.

Come spring Arctic temperatures will be lower than normal, as they have been the last two years snow melt will go slower than normal, and there will be more multi-year ice than the year before. Worldwide temperatures will no longer get the boost they got from the unusually warm winter, so the “18 year pause” will be back, now as a 19 year pause.

What worries me are a number of factors, all leading to a new ice age much faster than what can be expected even with our best efforts to increase the CO2 level.

The next solar cycle, cycle 25 will be weaker than predicted, surpassing even the Maunder minimum. The Maunder minimum coincided with the little ice age.

The earth’s magnetic field is starting to act erratically. The magnetic north pole is speeding up and is now way up in the Arctic, near the North pole. The chart on the right shows the observed north dip poles during 1831 – 2007 as yellow squares. Modeled pole locations from 1590 to 2020 are circles progressing from blue to yellow. In addition the magnetic field is getting substantially weaker, maybe a breakup is possible having two North Poles and two South Poles. If this occurs, the protection from the cosmic radiation from the Sun will be weakened, causing more clouds and maybe trigger the next ice age.

Then there is the double star KIC 9832227. They are only 1,800 light-years away, are an eclipsing binary pair, which means as they revolve around one another, each one briefly blots out the other from the perspective of a viewer on Earth. In 2021 or 2022 we will see them merge into one causing a red supernova. When this happens, because they are so near, we may even observe gravity waves. But from a climate standpoint there will be a burst of cosmic radiation, first the gamma rays coming at the speed of light, then with a slight delay the other cosmic radiation, coming at a time of the solar minimum and an unusually weak earth magnetic field.

This is new territory, and the best we can do is to increase CO2. It will not help much, but CO2 will help rather than hurt.

Then there is always the possibility of a supervolcanic explosion spewing ash way up into the stratosphere.

And for people who want to worry, don’t forget supersized meteorites!

All these worst case fears lead to a cooling earth.

On the other hand, the Sun is heating up at a rate of about 1% per 100 million years, not enough to worry about.