Excerpted from The Energy Advocate February 2020.
Causal Chain of Events Howard Cork Hayden Let us begin this discussion with the famous picture from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. He parades in front of a huge screen displaying the temperature and the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the earth for the last 700,000 years or so. Both rise and fall together, showing long 100,000-year glacial cycles interspersed with 10,000-15,000-year interglacials, such as our present one. He implies that the stupidest kid in a 5th-grade class could easily see the fit, and that increasing CO2 is the cause of the warming. In the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental report on Climate Change (AR5 of the IPCC) we read, There is high confidence that orbital forcing is the primary external driver of glacial cycles. [Emphasis in original.] Here, “orbital forcing” in AR5 refers to three orbital parameters well known to astronomers: the varying eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, the varying tilt of the Earth’s axis, and the precession of the tilt axis. We needn’t concern ourselves with the numerical details; suffice it to say that the IPCC states in no uncertain terms that the periodic variations in those three parameters (the Milankovitch cycles) are the cause of the glacial cycles shown by Mr. Gore in the famous picture. Two notions above—that the Milankovitch cycles drive the glacial cycles, and that CO2 changes cause temperature changes—imply a causal chain that is apparently neither recognized nor explained by Mr. Gore, the IPCC, or other alarmists. The implied chain of events is this: 1. 2.
Milankovitch cycles change the atmospheric CO2 concentration; CO2 changes then cause temperature changes. 1