Retrograde

Planetary Motion: The History of an Idea That Launched the Scientific Revolution

The ancient Greek philosophers, whose ideas shaped the worldview of Western Civilization leading up to the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth century, had conflicting theories about why the planets moved across the sky.  One camp thought that the planets orbited around the Sun, but Aristotle, whose ideas prevailed, believed that the planets and the Sun orbited Earth.

Most planetary motion could be explained by Aristotle’s earth-centred model.  However, “retrograde motion” or the inexplicable reversal of planetary motion could only be explained with a model where the sun was central.  Seeing this finally defeated the so-called “scientific consensus.”

Both the science and religion of Climate Change must be challenged.

In the 16^th century it was very difficult to change establishment thinking.  Why?  What was at risk?  The pride of man.

In the 21^st century, establishment thinking is ossified, yet is being rejected by a growing proportion of the populace. Why can the commoner see this, but the elite can’t? To be answered later.  What is at risk today?  One of two things, depending on your worldview:

1. Mother Earth; or
2. Trillions of dollars, the world’s resources, Billions of lives and global hegemony.

This article will leverage the concept of planetary “retrograde motion” as an analogue for climate data that defies the “warming blanket” Greenhouse gas effect based on CO2.  It will then warn of the likely consequences of blindly following the so-called “scientific consensus.”

Rather than arguing about outgoing long-wave radiation and the spectral emissivity of CO2, this article will simply appeal to the relationship between temperature and CO2 data, to evidence of its falsification at the highest levels of climate science and to documented plans for limiting the generation of Carbon Dioxide.

Before I continue, let’s establish some historical context.

However, according to paleo data, the average CO2 concentration in the preceding 600 million years appeared to be more than 2,600 ppm, nearly seven times our current amount and 2.5 times the worst case predicted by the IPCC for 2100. According to a reconstruction of the Earth’s temperature of the last 4 billion years, Earth is now in one of the coldest periods in its history. Paleo data indicates that the Late Ordovician Period included an Ice Age while simultaneously having CO2 concentrations nearly 12 times higher than today — 4400 ppm. 

 

Thankfully, the earth has experienced a warming trend since then.  Viewed in the context of millions of years of Earth history, our recent increase of 0.8°C (1.4°F) (?) appears minuscule.  Was this temperature rise due to the natural, complex, multi-factor climate system or was Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) the cause?  Did the earth begin to warm because of CO2 released during 20^th century industrialisation or are the causes found in nature?  Is the Radiative Greenhouse Effect (earth’s warming blanket) scientific consensus and is CO2 the temperature forcing factor that must be targeted?  No-one who studies history is a climate denier.  The climate has changed drastically over the earth’s history.  However, there are some big questions to be answered.  The first one is:

1. Was the rise in temperature over the past 120 years due primarily to nature or man?

Enter the UNIPCC

The preface to this Wikipedia entry: Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports” includes

“The description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports has changed since the first report in 1990 as scientific understanding of the temperature record of the past 1000 years has improved.  The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) are the best-known temperature fluctuations in the last millennium.”

Prior to the UNIPCC reports, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were recognised by palaeontologists the world over.

 

While pre-historic evidence for CO2 temperature decoupling exists (mentioned earlier), this is far more recent, with additional anthropological evidence in addition to more accurate temperature proxies.

From the First Assessment Report (1990) we read:

“With the growth of interest in global warming in the 1980s came renewed interest in the past temperature record as well as the question of whether past times had been warmer or colder than “present”.  However, available records were then few.”

The Wikipedia entry states:  “A paper by Jones, Keith Briffa et al. noted that … those publications have no explicit calibration against instrumental data, [and are] just Lamb’s qualitative judgement and interpretation of what he refers to as the ‘evidence.’”  Please note these names: Jones, Briffa.

The Second Assessment Report (1995) continued to challenge the previously accepted magnitude and scope of the Medieval Warm Period as we read “a clearer picture may emerge as more and better calibrated proxy records are produced.”

The IPCC third report says of the MWP that “the posited Medieval Warm Period appears to have been less distinct, more moderate in amplitude, and somewhat different in timing at the hemispheric scale than is typically inferred for the conventionally defined European epoch.  The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of (Jones et al. 1998), (Mann et al. 1999), and (Crowley & Lowery 2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2°C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures.”

The MWP continued to be downplayed in the Fourth (2007) and was eventually eliminated in the Fifth (2013) Assessment Report.  The recent history of Net Zero Carbon policies relates directly to these UNIPCC Assessment Reports and to their authors, especially Mann, Jones and Briffa.

From this article: Net Zero: A Short History, we read: ”limiting global temperature change means limiting the cumulative (or stock) of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere.  To eventually stop global warming, net anthropogenic additions of CO2 into the atmosphere have to reach zero.”

In 2013, the Fifth Assessment Report was used to “provide a clear pathway to zero net emissions” and the Paris agreement in 2015.  The key authors (Mann, Jones and Briffa) of UN IPCC assessment reports had convinced sufficient key influencers of the coupling between CO2 and temperature. 

Were they acting in good faith?

In my article: Closing Arguments we read that:

Dr. Michael Mann selected proxy data that specifically agreed with his AGW view, rewriting history by removing the Medieval Warm Period.  After 1998 the UNIPCC reports began to promote Mann’s hockey stick graph exclusively.

In Nov 2011, 5000 private emails between Jones, Mann, Briffa and others were leaked and published online.  This became known as “Climategate.”  The “Climategate” emails revealed how proxy data had been cherry-picked, manipulated and spliced to remove the MWP and support the AGW narrative.

Phil Jones, the Director of the Climate Research Unit, admitted a similar deception when describing a graph for the 2007 UNIPCC report.  His selective use of the (now departed) CRU deputy Director Keith Briffa’s tree-ring data and “Mike’s Nature trick,” enabled this ruse, designed to “hide the [temperature] decline.”  In an email to Michael Mann, Keith Briffa “agonized over the best course of action… the Mann reconstruction (and others) DO INDEED show evidence of Medieval warmth.”

Official Temperature Data

The Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN) is the world’s source for global temperature data.  The GHCN is comprised of three main global temperature histories: the combined CRU-Hadley record (HadCRUT), the NASA-GISS (GISTEMP) record, and the NOAA record.  The Canadian Professor of Economics, Ross McKitrick contributed significant research and peer-reviewed articles on the integrity of the temperature data managed by the GHCN.

McKitrick also pointed out issues with:

• The Urban Heat Island Effect bias;
• USHCN weather stations migrating to urban areas;
• Most existing US weather stations exhibiting high measurement errors;
• The Sea Surface Temperature measurement record being replete with errors “…which could fundamentally change the picture of mid-century warming;” and
• a homogenisation algorithm which contaminates clean with dirty temperature data.

This combination of issues coalesced to create a steeper and straighter Hockey-Stick blade, adding 0.3 degrees C to the data over time – cooling the hot 1930’s, warming the present and flattening the 1940 – 1970 cooling period.

The owner of the GHCN is Phil Jones; the same Phil Jones who used “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline.”

Phil Jones confided (in a July 8 2004 email) that he and co-author Kevin Trenberth were determined to keep McKitrick’s evidence out of the IPCC report.

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report.  Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is” wrote Jones.

In 2004, Jones admitted to an interviewer that

“even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data.  We have 25 or so years invested in the work.  Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

In 2009, a Freedom of Information request was submitted to the CRU to release the raw weather station data and its processing methods for inspection.  Phil Jones refused to release the data claiming that it was lost / destroyed.

Official Carbon Dioxide Data

American climate scientist Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, devised a method to measure seasonal and annual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Between 1980 and 2005, AGW proponents and legacy media convinced key influencers that Carbon Dioxide was pollution (not plant food) and needed to be eliminated.

However, if correlation is all that is needed to prove a theory, then why not advocate for:

After all, they do correlate well, just like CO2 and Temperature.

Let’s now return to the thrust of this article –  examples of Retrograde Motion in Climate Data.

The first Retrograde Motion example provided was in relation to pre-historic and medieval decoupling of CO2 levels and global temperatures.  The article: Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon provides even more detailed evidence from the later Jurassic era.  Evidence for decoupling in the Late Ordovician Period was presented earlier in Retrograde (an Ice Age occurring with CO2 at 4400 ppm).

The second Retrograde Motion example shows that in the midst of a global warming trend, global temperatures reversed course – opposite to the CO2 trend.

This was the TRUE industrialisation of the 20^th century.  If the relatively small amount of CO2 emitted from 1900 – 1940 caused the warming post Little Ice Age, then the Radiative Greenhouse Effect should have accelerated warming, not cooling post-1940.

Following this debacle, a new rhetoric was required; one that would work equally well when temperatures rose or fell. “Climate change” was born.

The third Retrograde Motion example shows that the world has not seen any significant rise in temperature for almost 20 years.  Note from the temperature anomaly vs CO2 graph above, the “official” temperature data sets, used for decades and administered by scientists including Phil Jones, claimed a temperature rise from 2005 to 2020 of approximately 0.25 deg C.  You may recall my earlier comments about inaccurate temperature measurement systems.  Well, in 2005, the highly accurate US Climate Reference Network was launched. The USCRN is the world’s ONLY accurate temperature measurement network.  I wrote about this in detail in Closing Arguments.

The graph below is based on Keeling Curve data with seasonality removed.  It simply includes the highest CO2 reading for each year from 2005 through 2023 (May is the peak month for CO2).

Although significant variation in temperatures still exist (e.g. from El Nino and La Nina events), it is evident that temperatures have NOT RISEN in the past 18 years. In fact, instead of a 0.25 degrees C temperature rise, the average temperature anomaly over the USCRN era has dropped by almost 0.1 degrees C.

Just like the 1940’s through 1970’s, this period cannot be explained by the RGHE effect.  Now, let’s add to this scenario the following RGHE impacts. 

If the UNIPCC models were accurate, these two events should have had a profound impact on temperatures. In case you don’t know, the modelled influence of methane and water vapour on the RGHE effect dwarfs that of CO2.  Even if these two emissions did influence the hotter than recent summers in the Northern hemisphere, it would appear that other natural climatic forces have kept overall temperatures in check.

Despite the fact that USCRN temperatures have been flat / declining for 18 years, the UN (the group that gave us Agenda 2030, 17 SDGs and paedophile apologetics) is ramping up the fear-porn. 

Here are some samples from an Aug 2021 report:

• ‘Code red’ for human driven global heating
• Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying, and some trends are now irreversible
• The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable
• Human influence on the climate system is undisputed
• There will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons
• The drama exists, … what the science says is exhibited before our very eyes

More from a Feb 2022 report:

• A damning indictment of failed global leadership on climate
• A stark warning about the impact of climate change on people and the planet
• Ecosystem collapse, species extinction, deadly heatwaves and floods
• Dangerous and widespread disruptions
• Half measures are no longer an option

This is from a UN report Oct 2022:

Climate change the greatest threat the world has ever faced, UN expert warns:

“Throughout the world, human rights are being negatively impacted and violated as a consequence of climate change. This includes the right to life, health, food, development, self-determination, water and sanitation, work, adequate housing and freedom from violence, sexual exploitation, trafficking and slavery.  (Ian Fry)

Perhaps the United Nations should be advocating for bans on destroying gas pipelines and bans on volcanic eruptions [satire] instead of frightening children and stoking hatred in the middle east.

I’d now like to pick up on the comment “Half measures are no longer an option” and use that to focus on a most benign element within the previous graph – April through October of 2020.  If we were ever going to conduct a real-life experiment of the impact of Net Zero Carbon policies on atmospheric CO2 levels, it would be the COVID lockdowns.  Planes, cars, trucks, industry – all severely curtailed.

There is no discernible change.  But don’t trust your lying eyes.  The official narrative is that “The 2020 increase was 22 percent lower than the increase in 2019.”    That sounds like voodoo maths to me.

In the video, Bill Gates provided an insight into what the global elites will do next.  Thankfully, you don’t need conspiracy theories.  We simply need to do what Dr. James Lindsay says: read their plans and believe them when they tell you what they’re planning to do.

In his May 2023 episode: Absolute Zero and the Western Holodomor, Dr. Lindsay read through and discussed the implication of a report by UK Fires on Absolute Zero.

From Dr. Lindsay’s web page:

“A report filed in 2019 by the prestigious government-funded UK organization of engineers and scientists, UK FIRES, thinks Net Zero is not enough and is pushing for an insanely aggressive program called “Absolute Zero,” absolutely zero emissions by 2050.  What does it entail?  Among other things, no flights, no container shipping, no red meat consumption, no cement, no new steel production, and no fossil fuel use for any reason, even plastics, by 2050.  How do they expect this to be possible?  Draconian governmental action combined with drastic semi-voluntary reductions in individual quality of life for all citizens.”

In his Aug 2023 episode: Degrowth: The West’s Great Leap Backwards, Dr. Lindsay analyses the concept of “degrowth”

From his web page:

“The “Net Zero” and “Sustainability” movements, which no one outside of captured institutions and minds particularly likes or trusts, is advancing to a new initiative, whether we like it or not.  That initiative is every bit as bad as it sounds: Degrowth.  The idea is that the West has grown too big to be sustainable, so it is time to back off from growth, or to move “beyond growth,” to draw another of their brands.  This is little more than the controlled demolition of Western Civilization on an economic level, and it is unsurprisingly just the newest branding of Communism.”

Whoa, JV.  This is crazy!  World leaders could not stoop to that level of evil.  Could they?

In 1991, following the fall of Communism, world leaders needed a new reason to justify their lust for quasi-global totalitarian control.  They needed to pivot.  But to what?

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

The First Global Revolution (1991)

Can Science help us?

Did you know that after Einstein postulated his Theory of General Relativity, one hundred authors published a collection of various criticisms in the book “Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein” (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein).  It would appear that there was a scientific consensus.

This Apr 2019 Spectator article entitled: If one scientist was enough for Einstein… ends with:

That would be true of the alarmist argument about global warming – if it were not a cult, impervious to reason and real science.”

The Spectator article includes a 16 minute video by Professor Ian Clark, before the Canadian Senate, summarising several of the points made in Retrograde. 

At the (13:00 min) mark he compares atmospheric temperature data from weather balloons with that modelled by the UN IPCC.  [Similar retrograde weather balloon data is discussed in Did you Check the Fuse?]

“There is no hot spot.  In fact, we have cooling.  So, we might suggest that the models are incorrect. … And here’s what the people who run these models say.”  Note who is central to this leaked email discussion – Phil Jones.

Thorne (Met Office):  Observations do not show rising temperature throughout the tropical troposphere. … This is just downright dangerous.  We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.  Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary.

Phil Jones:  Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not enough middle and low level clouds.  [refer to my article Clouds.]

Wilson:  What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?  They’ll kill us probably.”

Dr. Clark then goes on to point out that the sun appears to play a much greater role in the earth’s temperature than CO2.

Please recall the first question that this article attempted to address:

1. Was the rise in temperature over the past 120 years due primarily to nature or man?

I trust this was been answered adequately.  However, there is second, equally important question:

2. Are there any significant forces influencing the answer to Question 1?

Follow the Money.

This 2018 Heritage article provides some insight into just how much money was being pumped into Big Climate back in 2013: “Five years ago [2013], a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative issued a study which found that “Global investment in climate change” reached $359 billion that year.  Then to give you a sense of how money-hungry these planet-saviors are, the CPI moaned that this spending ‘falls far short of what’s needed’ a number estimated at $5 trillion.”  God only knows how big the pork barrel is today!

As recently as 2020, Soros and Gates funded Project Syndicate (PS) to the tune of $6.5M.  PS is pushing an eco-extremist idea that the world may need a “climate lockdown” to pre-empt climate change unless we have a “green economic transformation.”

Liberal billionaire George Soros said the pandemic was providing a “revolutionary moment.”

It’s difficult to image just how much is being wasted on such a foolish and dangerous agenda today.

We may never know how much money Michael Mann, Phil Jones and others were paid for their data manipulation and collusion.  These were significant authors of UNIPCC reports.  A straight line can be drawn from their deception to the Net Zero catastrophe the world is currently suffering through.

Despite the obvious lies and collusion, should the speech of obvious bad faith actors ever be cancelled?  I say No, even though I lost a great job for daring to speak truth to power.  Lies should simply be defeated in the free marketplace of ideas with data and solid arguments. I trust you agree with me.

Returning to Copernicus – the Zeitgeist

Money is definitely a strong motivator for creating Climate Alarmism.  However, I don’t believe it’s a sufficient reason to keep followers trapped within the lie; especially when faced with obvious fraud and conflicting data.  The Zeitgeist or spirit of the Age is perhaps the primary factor.

As the geocentric scientific worldview was embraced by establishment church leaders, so the Anthropogenic Global Warming worldview is also embraced by establishment globalist leaders, making it a doctrine of religion as much as natural philosophy.  This same type of scientific opinion, ossified with religious fervour, exists with today’s so-called Climate Change “scientific consensus.”  The deception of both the science and religion of Climate Change now lay exposed.

This article began with a time when man believed that the earth was central to the solar system.  Retrograde motion forced man to realise his error.  The sun is central.

Today, many believe that the acts of man upon the earth – emitting carbon into the atmosphere – are central to the climate.  Retrograde climate data will force man to (eventually) realise his error.  Once again, it would appear that the sun is central.

Retrograde is a call to return to the natural order of things … before the world goes to hell in a hand-basket.